The URW-KG: a Resource for Tackling the Underrepresentation of non-Western Writers

TL;DR

This paper introduces the URW-KG, a knowledge graph integrating multiple sources to improve representation and discovery of non-Western authors and literary works, addressing digital archive biases.

Contribution

The paper presents the URW-KG, a novel resource combining data from Wikidata, Open Library, Goodreads, and Google Books to enhance non-Western author representation.

Findings

KG embeddings improve access to non-Western works

URW-KG enables fairer author discovery tools

Integrated data enhances exploration of underrepresented literature

Abstract

Digital media have enabled the access to unprecedented literary knowledge. Authors, readers, and scholars are now able to discover and share an increasing amount of information about books and their authors. Notwithstanding, digital archives are still unbalanced: writers from non-Western countries are less represented, and such a condition leads to the perpetration of old forms of discrimination. In this paper, we present the Under-Represented Writers Knowledge Graph (URW-KG), a resource designed to explore and possibly amend this lack of representation by gathering and mapping information about works and authors from Wikidata and three other sources: Open Library, Goodreads, and Google Books. The experiments based on KG embeddings showed that the integrated information encoded in the graph allows scholars and users to be more easily exposed to non-Western literary works and authors with respect to Wikidata alone. This opens to the development of fairer and effective tools for author discovery and exploration.