Famous Vermonters

It’s been about four years since I’ve written here, and a lot has changed. My wife and I were married in July 2019, and we welcomed our daughter in April 2021. What a whirlwind! We like to keep the focus on mapping and Vermont here at this site, but I do feel very lucky and proud of our little family ❤️

We’ve also just moved back to the state (July 2021) and I’ve got a million blog post ideas. I’ll start with a straightforward one- who’s the most famous Vermonter ever? Ethan Allen? Bernie Sanders? Calvin Coolidge? John Deere? John LeClair?

And how do you define famous? And the classic question- how do you decide who is a Vermonter? I’m going to rely on wikipedia to enforce both of these standards. It’s a little dubious, but we need some help:

‘Famous’ will be defined using qrank, a ranking system using wikipedia pageviews
‘Vermonter’ as defined by the List of people from Vermont wikipedia article

Pulling the data

I used the incredible npm wtf_wikipedia package to pull down the Famous Vermonters data. The package made it really easy to pull in this data- letting me poke at it in a node REPL until I had it working correctly. To match each famous vermonter to their respective qrank, I then queried the wikipedia API to get their wikidata ID, then wrote the output to a CSV. As a node n00b it probably took me three full hours to get the async stuff right. I tried it all- requests, promises, request-promises, you name it.

Here’s the code to build a CSV of Famous Vermonter and their wikidata IDs in case you want to follow along at home.

Importing it into SQL

And to import the Famous Vermonters CSV into postgres:

create table vermonters (qid text, name text);
\COPY vermonters(qid, name) from 'famous_vermonters.csv' DELIMITER ',' CSV HEADER;

I did some similar with the qrank dataset, but have misplaced that code. It’s a pretty straightforward CSV –> postgres import.

Database queries

OK, now we’ve got our famous vermonters CSV and the ranking for all wikidata entries . . . let’s join them 🎉

select distinct on (qrank, qid) name, qrank
from vermonters a,
  qrank b
where a.qid = b.entity
order by qrank desc, qid;

And the winner is . . . 🥁🥁🥁

Now bear in mind that this is purely a ranking of how many times folks have clicked on this person’s wikipedia page. And this person didn’t even really grow up in Vermont. And . . . ok here are the final rankings:

name	qrank
Ted Bundy (1946–1989), serial killer; born in Burlington	12098835
Bernie Sanders, politician, Vermont Senator since 2007	5997027
Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States; born in Plymouth Notch	2338343
Rudyard Kipling, British author; resident of Brattleboro when he wrote The Jungle Book	2085495
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian author, recipient, 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature	1908792
Randy Quaid, actor	1868975
Felicity Huffman, actress; attended school in Putney	1858119
Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet	1609669
Joseph Smith (1805–1844), founder of Latter Day Saint movement; born in Sharon	1577037
Joanna ‘JoJo’ Levesque, singer, actress; born in Brattleboro	1537455

What’s next?

Wow - by wikipedia standards Ted Bundy is more than twice as famous as Bernie Sanders . . . eesh. I’m not sure how we can change this, other than visiting the wikipedia articles of our favorite lesser-known Vermonters to bump them up the list. I’ll make a plug here for Hetty Green, Cyrus Pringle and of course Phineas Gage.

MappingVermont