The World Literature Knowledge Graph

TL;DR

The paper introduces The World Literature Knowledge Graph, a comprehensive semantic resource that integrates global literary data from multiple communities, enhancing access and discovery of non-Western literature for diverse users.

Contribution

It presents a large, multilingual knowledge graph of authors and works, integrated from different communities, with an accessible visualization platform validated by experts.

Findings

Knowledge graph contains 194,346 writers and 965,210 works.

The platform is highly beneficial for teachers, researchers, and industry professionals.

Expert feedback confirms effective utilization for various literary tasks.

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. However, these sources of knowledge are fragmented and do not adequately represent non-Western writers and their works. In this paper we present The World Literature Knowledge Graph, a semantic resource containing 194,346 writers and 965,210 works, specifically designed for exploring facts about literary works and authors from different parts of the world. The knowledge graph integrates information about the reception of literary works gathered from 3 different communities of readers, aligned according to a single semantic model. The resource is accessible through an online visualization platform, which can be found at the following URL: https://literaturegraph.di.unito.it/. This platform has been rigorously tested and validated by $3$ distinct categories of experts who have found it to be highly beneficial for their respective work domains. These categories include teachers, researchers in the humanities, and professionals in the publishing industry. The feedback received from these experts confirms that they can effectively utilize the platform to enhance their work processes and achieve valuable outcomes.