Time Person of the Year — A snapshot of history with data
Time magazine recently published the dataset of who has been featured as Person of the Year from 1927 in Kaggle. Time “Person of the Year”, called “Man of the Year” until 1999 , profiles a person, an idea, a group or an object each year that“for better or for worse… has done the most to influence the events of the year”.
Naturally, the selection has been controversial so far because of selecting many controversial figures such as Adolf Hitler, Khomeni and Stalin. However, because of the selection of revered people throughout the history, Person of the Year award is considered to be an award by many.
The dataset given on Kaggle has many features including Year, Name of the award, Name of the recipient, Country, Birth Year, Death Year, Title of the Recipient, Category and Context. From those, we can find out answers to questions such as who has been given the award multiple times, which are the groups that got the award , which category is most frequent and which country gets the most awards.
Historically, the award has been given to political personas more often than others as they have often done more to influence the world from the position of power. From the dataset we can also see 41% of the nominees has been from Politics and 19% from War. Media and Environment both are nearly invisible among the categories. Ted Turner, is the only person from the Media category, as the founder of CNN who has been featured in 1991 at the age of 53.
The other lonely category is environment where the recipient is none other than our planet earth, which got the award of being “Planet of the Year” by times under the name of “The Endangered Earth” in 1991 in an ironic twist.
Naming conventions of the award has been changed frequently to adapt according to changing social customs, as “Man of the Year” was changed to “Person of the Year”, presumably to create a more gender neutral environment for the recipients. However, Time has occasionally created some unique awards such as “Person of the Century”, awarded to Albert Einstein in 1949, for representing a century of scientific exploration and wonder.
Other special awards are “Machine of the Year” , awarded to “The Computer” for pioneering the dawn of the information age, “Man of the Half century”, awarded to Winston Churchill in 1949 and “Man of the Decade”, awarded to Gorbachev in 1989.
Historically, US Presidents has been the recipients of the award, some even has been elected multiple times, sending Franklin D. Roosevelt up the leaderboard as the only person to have received the title three times, first as president-elect (1932) and later as the incumbent president (1934 and 1941). Even here we see most of the repeat nominees are US Presidents or political figures from other countries.
According to Wikipedia :
Since the list began, every serving President of the United States has been a Person of the Year at least once with the exceptions of Calvin Coolidge, in office at time of the first issue, Herbert Hoover, the next U.S. president, and Gerald Ford. Most were named Person of the Year either the year they were elected or while they were in office; the only one to be given the title before being elected is Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1944 as Supreme Commander of the Allied Invasion Force, eight years before his election. He subsequently received the title again in 1959, while in office.
Presidential bias aside, USA is the top country for scoring the person of the year award among 21 countries as 60% of the total awards from 1927 has been awarded to United States.
Almost all of the candidates from Soviet Union and China falls under Politics and War category. Interestingly enough, despite being the worlds smallest country, Vatican City is also influential when it comes to getting awards repeatedly, as 3 different Popes has been elected so far under the religion category. Pope John XXIII(1962), Pope John Paul II(1964) and Pope Francis(2013).
If we want to look at the age distribution of the recipients over the categories, we can see most of the nominees are between 40–60. Environment category is blank as the only recipient is planet earth.
In the Philanthropy category we have a group “The Good Samaritans”
in 2005 including Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono. Under Religion we have only 3 popes, each of whom were above 70 as a nominee. We have most data under the politics and war category. Under technology, we again have only 3 human recipients, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Intel CEO Andrew Grove.
Under the space field, we have 3 Astronauts from The Apollo 8 adventure and Nikita Khrushchev for Sputnik 1. The youngest person to ever achieve the award are Charles Lindbergh, at the age of 25 who won it for the first solo transatlantic flight. According to Wikipedia, The Person of the Year essentially began with Lindbergh’s election.
The tradition of selecting a “Man of the Year” began in 1927, with Time editors contemplating the news makers of the year. The idea was also an attempt to remedy the editorial embarrassment earlier that year of not having aviator Charles Lindbergh on its cover following his historic trans-Atlantic flight. By the end of the year, it was decided that a cover story featuring Lindbergh as the Man of the Year would serve both purposes.[3]
The other two people who have achieved it in 20s(both 26) are Elizabeth II during her Royal Coronation and Mark Zuckberg, founder of Facebook.
According to the given dataset by Time, these contexts have appeared among the nominees frequently so far. We can see Presidential Election is the most frequent category, second most being World War 2. World War 2 is definitely the most influential war in our global history as it kick-started globalization, however, getting a President auto-featured per election when they are elected, does not really make a interesting point for me. May be giving the award when the President gets replaced by someone else depending on the Presidents performance would be more of an intellectual exercise for the selection committee. But to their credit, they have also elected other World Leaders from China, Germany, India etc.
Time has made things interesting by selecting many groups over the year such as “The Peacemakers”(1993), “The Ebola Fighters”(2014), “The Protester”(2011) for Arab Spring ,“The Good Samaritans”(2005), “The Inheritors” etc . However, when it comes to selecting women, the numbers are few, almost non-existent. Wikipedia quotes :
In 1999, the title was changed to Person of the Year.[4] Women who have been selected for recognition after the renaming include “The Whistleblowers” (Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley, and Sherron Watkins in 2002), Melinda Gates (jointly with Bill Gates and Bono, in 2005), and Angela Merkel in 2015. Prior to 1999, four women were granted the title as individuals: three as “Woman of the Year” — Wallis Simpson (1936), Queen Elizabeth II (1952), and Corazon Aquino (1986)–and one as half of the “Man and Wife of the Year”, Soong Mei-ling (1937).[5] “American Women” were recognized as a group in 1975.
Perhaps in this snapshot we can end with analyzing how Time should try to be less biased towards Presidents, considering it has named Donald Trump as the Person of the Year for 2016. However, as a US company, it is in their financial interest to cover the Presidents. The choices done so far take us to a nostalgic ride to meeting the popular and the hated people throughout the history and time will tell what will be spoken of Donald Trump.
My actual, grounded advice for Time as a straight-forward data science beginner would be these :
- Select some people from the Technology, Philanthropy and Environment sector to give an incentive instead of only choosing politicians. Selecting Earth as the “Planet of the Year” does not make any sense if we stay busy in destroying it. Not to mention planet earth is not a real, breathing human being who’s doing some real work in the environmental sector. Selecting Bill +Melinda Gates and Bono only for philanthropy does not make any sense either where there’s groups such as “MIT JPAL Poverty Action Lab” and ideas such as “Effective Altruism” right now who are focusing on changing the whole paradigm of philanthropy as well as giving funding. In the next few years, I’d really love to see the historical award get modernized.
- Select more Women as Person of the Year. Until now only 4 women have been chosen individually as “Woman of the Year” or “Person of the Year”, excluding the groups. Angela Markel, Corazon Aquino, Elizabeth II, and Wallis Simpson. The other two have been awarded with their husbands, Melinda Gates and Soong-Mei-Ying, as cited from Wikipedia. Probably going as far as two-digits (e.g 10+) would make nice references.
Code can be found here
