En octubre hemos participado en el International Workshop | Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikibase: Usage Scenarios for Literary Studies, organizado por los investigadores Frank Fischer and Bart Soethaert del proyecto "Digital Observatory of World Literature", Research Area 5: "Building Digital Communities".
Un encuentro con un programa muy afinado. Diversas aproximaciones para comprender la literatura global a partir de los datos que emergen de la actividad de las comunidades en proyectos Wikimedia. El lema del proyecto que nos reúne es Temporal Communities, doing literature in a global perspective. Franz Fischer y Jonah Lubin han elaborado esta detallada Tagungsbericht (reseña) sobre las presentaciones en H-Soz-Kultz.
Participamos con una presentación basada en nuestras investigaciones en curso sobre el canon literario según Wikipedia, bajo el título
"Measuring the literary field and creative works: the case of world literary canon according to Wikipedia and Wikidata" . Disponible en el Repositorio Digitum de la Universidad de Murcia.
Juan Antonio Pastor Sánchez & Tomás Saorín. Berlín, 2023
This ongoing research project aims to verify the use of Wikidata and Wikipedia as a source to identify a universal literary canon in pursuit of an good enough answer to the question of how many books could be considered as an all-times global literary canon and, given this quantity, which titles should be included. Both Wikimedia Foundation projects should be understood from the point of view of data on global and multilingual literary works. The methodology used is based on the construction of a dataset from specific data on literary works retrieved from Wikidata and Wikipedia editions in all languages.
The depth of description of the items of literary works in Wikidata and their presence and level of elaboration of the corresponding articles in Wikipedia are analyzed. The authors use K-means to define three clusters of literary works. The least numerous clusters identify a set of works that can be used to demarcate a universal literary canon, without the direct intervention of any individual academic, publisher group or institution. A measure called Wiki3DRank is also proposed as a metric that allows the literary works analyzed to be selected and ranked. The study deals with the analysis of the language of literary works and their presence in Wikipedia and their temporal distribution.
The correct definition of “what is a work” also arises as a challenging problem of proper taxonomy and classification of items, with many challenges in the fields of cultural and bibliographic studies. The research includes a discussion section with reflections on the results obtained and concludes with the proposal to use Wikidata and Wikipedia as an alternative source for the elaboration of both global and language-specific literary canons. Also, further refinements are proposed to rank other kinds of creative works, such as films, pictures, essays or fictional novels.
First public results are published as a paper in Revista Española de Documentación Científica, vol. 46, 3 (2023) https://redc.revistas.csic.es/index.php/redc/article/view/1519