Connecting a French Dictionary from the Beginning of the 20th Century to Wikidata

TL;DR

This paper connects early 20th-century French dictionary entries to Wikidata, enabling automated analysis and comparison of historical and contemporary cultural representations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to link historical dictionary entries to Wikidata, creating a resource for analyzing cultural and historical information efficiently.

Findings

Annotated 20,245 dictionary entries with Wikidata links

Enabled automated comparison of historical and modern data

Provided examples of processing Wikidata identifiers

Abstract

The \textit{Petit Larousse illustr\'e} is a French dictionary first published in 1905. Its division in two main parts on language and on history and geography corresponds to a major milestone in French lexicography as well as a repository of general knowledge from this period. Although the value of many entries from 1905 remains intact, some descriptions now have a dimension that is more historical than contemporary. They are nonetheless significant to analyze and understand cultural representations from this time. A comparison with more recent information or a verification of these entries would require a tedious manual work. In this paper, we describe a new lexical resource, where we connected all the dictionary entries of the history and geography part to current data sources. For this, we linked each of these entries to a wikidata identifier. Using the wikidata links, we can automate more easily the identification, comparison, and verification of historically-situated representations. We give a few examples on how to process wikidata identifiers and we carried out a small analysis of the entities described in the dictionary to outline possible applications. The resource, i.e. the annotation of 20,245 dictionary entries with wikidata links, is available from GitHub url{https://github.com/pnugues/petit_larousse_1905/