Who were the most important people of 2019 through the eyes of the world's news media and what were the most important connections between the personalities that defined this year?

With a single BigQuery query and just 21 seconds, we have the visualization below of the top 1,500 strongest co-occurring pairs of people mentioned in the news worldwide across the 65 languages monitored by GDELT.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump formed the central nexus of the year in review, with the 2020 Democratic field above him, while the global ramifications of Brexit offered it its own cluster in pink a bit below him. (Click to enlarge).

 

You can download the files for this visualization:

• Full Resolution Image (6K x 6K)
• Gephi File
• CSV Edge List

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Creating this graph took just a single query in BigQuery:

SELECT Source, Target, Count RawCount, "Undirected" Type, ( Count/SUM(Count) OVER () ) Weight FROM (
SELECT a.entity Source, b.entity Target, COUNT(*) as Count
FROM (
 (SELECT DocumentIdentifier url, entity FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.gkg_partitioned`, UNNEST(SPLIT(REGEXP_REPLACE(V2Persons, r',\d+', ''),';')) AS entity WHERE DATE(_PARTITIONTIME) >= "2019-01-01" group by url,entity)
) a
JOIN (
 (SELECT DocumentIdentifier url, entity FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.gkg_partitioned`, UNNEST(SPLIT(REGEXP_REPLACE(V2Persons, r',\d+', ''),';')) AS entity WHERE DATE(_PARTITIONTIME) >= "2019-01-01" group by url,entity)
) b
ON a.url=b.url
WHERE a.entity<b.entity
GROUP BY 1,2
ORDER BY 3 DESC
LIMIT 1500
)
order by Count Desc