Occupational Inheritance and Kinship: An Empirical Study of Historical Social Elites on Wikidata

The relationship between occupational inheritance and kinship has often been witnessed in human history. Existing studies often rely on small-scale and regional data, and fail to reveal global and spatiotemporal dynamics of occupational inheritance. In this article, we conduct an empirical study on a large-scale dataset of historical social elites crawled from Wikidata, consisting of 691 503 validated relationship records involving 334 099 notable people from 3500 BCE to 2020 CE. Based on this dataset, we propose computational approaches to analyze the relationship between occupational inheritance and kinship, by defining the occupation connection index (OCI) measuring pairwise occupation connections under a certain social relationship, and the occupational inheritance index (OII) measuring the overall occupation inheritance across all occupation categories under parent–child relationships only. Subsequently, we reveal the varying impact of kinship over different occupation categories using OCI and also find interesting spatiotemporal patterns of OII reflecting key shifts in occupational inheritance which well align with key historical events and societal changes. Our study sheds light on the potential computational approaches to understanding occupational inheritance and kinship in a systematic manner with empirical evidence, which we believe will inspire further investigations in the field of computational social sciences.