The news. The people.
Back and forth.
News topics index patterns of people. Every people vector points back to the news axes that define it. Follow either direction, change the time window, and inspect the underlying coverage.
Loading the news–people map…
One map, two ways in.
A person’s qualified article mentions produce a profile in an existing, versioned news basis. The Eigen pipeline normalizes source and era coverage, then finds the principal directions across those profiles. Each people direction retains explicit signed loadings on every news axis. The reverse index uses the same loadings.
person × news profile B → centered B = U Σ Wᵀ
people coordinates = (B − mean) W
news-axis k ↔ people-axis j through W[k, j]The people model stays fixed when projecting a new time window. Positive and negative ends describe opposite directions within the measured coverage; neither is a value judgment or a verified personal affiliation. Retaining a subset of directions makes reconstruction approximate.
Similarity and significance answer different questions. The people basis uses equal article means within supported source-and-decade groups, then gives those groups and people equal weight. Original Eigen story significance appears alongside the profile as an attention signal. Attention is not silently multiplied into the affinity model.
Similarity reflects the selected corpus, window, mention qualification, and available evidence. A database news pattern can include founders, engineers, executives, or people discussed in a historical article. Current executive roles need separate dated evidence.
Article significance and news-basis methodology ↗