We have upload our own authors' englih translation of our recent paper about literary canon according to Wikipedia and Wikidata. You can download the full PDF from the institutional repository of UMU at: http://hdl.handle.net/10201/136527
How to cite / Citation: Pastor-Sánchez, J. A., Saorín, T., Baños-Moreno, M.J. (2023). Un canon literario universal basado en datos enciclopédicos multilingües: propuesta de un método de medición de obras literarias usando datos cuantitativos obtenidos de Wikidata y Wikipedia. Revista Española de Documentación Científica, 46 (3), e366. https://doi.org/10.3989/redc.2023.3.2013 (English authors/ version: http://hdl.handle.net/10201/136527 ) (Published under License: CC BY 4.0 DEED. Attribution 4.0 International)
This work is based on a very simple working hypothesis: Could we use Wikidata and Wikipedia as a source to identify a global literary canon? A literary canon is understood to be a cultural selection strongly affected by the point of view of the dominant group which has established it. Therefore, it is contended from the different positions which have emerged from various geographical, identity-based and cultural peripheries which seek to broaden the vision of the Western literary canon popularized by literary critic Harold Bloom or the essential authors and works contained in school textbooks and also in syllabus of higher education. In addition, any canon which is taken as a benchmark is not immutable and is subject to an endless process of attention, oblivion and recovery over centuries, eras, and decades. As the canon is a changing cultural construction, could the autonomous and unplanned activity of the community of Wikidata and Wikipedia editors be used to obtain another, complementary, point of view? These are communities involved in writing and categorizing articles in all languages and in defining descriptive data of all kinds. Supported by the idea of a neutral point of view and decentralized and multilingual collaboration, the Wikimedia ecosystem could be a candidate source for obtaining results that have not been directly mediated by any authors, academies, nations, or stakeholders of any type.
A few insights and results
There are exactly 163 top all-times literary works
It's difficult to extract every and each literary work using Wikidata types
It's challenging to delimitate what exactly is a literary work
There are many issues with compoud or aggregated or serial works, as The Bible, The Lord of the rings or Sherlock Holmes' tales and books.
Nota: Heading pic from Shelley Diaz post "Time to Refresh the Canon: Here Are Our Picks" at SLJ (School Library Journal), May 10, 2022