Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) one year before and after death. We measure the spike and decay of attention following death and model them as the interplay of communicative and cultural memory. Clustering reveals four patterns of post-mortem memory, and regression analysis shows that boosts in media attention are largest for pre-mortem popular anglophones of any gender who died a young, unnatural death; that long-term boosts are smallest for leaders and largest for artists; and that, while both the news and Twitter are triggered by young and unnatural deaths, the news additionally curates collective memory when old persons or leaders die. Overall, we illuminate the age-old question who is remembered by society, and the distinct roles of news and social media in collective memory formation.
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