Linking Named Entities in Diderot's \textit{Encyclop\'edie} to Wikidata

TL;DR

This paper links 10,300 entries from Diderot's 18th-century Encyclopédie to Wikidata, enabling digital comparison and study of knowledge evolution between historical and modern encyclopedias.

Contribution

It introduces a method to annotate and connect historical encyclopedia entries with Wikidata, creating a valuable resource for knowledge comparison.

Findings

Over 10,300 entries linked to Wikidata identifiers.

Annotated more than 2,600 geographic and human entity entries.

Created a resource available for further research at GitHub.

Abstract

Diderot's \textit{Encyclop\'edie} is a reference work from XVIIIth century in Europe that aimed at collecting the knowledge of its era. \textit{Wikipedia} has the same ambition with a much greater scope. However, the lack of digital connection between the two encyclopedias may hinder their comparison and the study of how knowledge has evolved. A key element of \textit{Wikipedia} is Wikidata that backs the articles with a graph of structured data. In this paper, we describe the annotation of more than 10,300 of the \textit{Encyclop\'edie} entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling us to connect these entries to the graph. We considered geographic and human entities. The \textit{Encyclop\'edie} does not contain biographic entries as they mostly appear as subentries of locations. We extracted all the geographic entries and we completely annotated all the entries containing a description of human entities. This represents more than 2,600 links referring to locations or human entities. In addition, we annotated more than 9,500 entries having a geographic content only. We describe the annotation process as well as application examples. This resource is available at https://github.com/pnugues/encyclopedie_1751