Acasă Articole RTR Digital Literary Memory of the Visegrad Region: Wikipedia, Wikidata as New Aspects...
Digital Literary Memory of the Visegrad Region: Wikipedia, Wikidata as New Aspects for Regional Literary History
Rezumat
Abstract: Our research explores the CEE region’s contemporary knowledge of itself, an important topic as the concept of the region as a unified cultural and geographical entity has weakened in recent decades (Appelbaum 2013, Komska 2018), while individual states and traditions increasingly focus inwardly and/or align with Western or global trends. (Cobel-Tokarska 2020, 13.) In this study, as the initial step in this broader project, we focus on the Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) to examine the extent of their knowledge about each other’s literary cultures. To address this, we investigate which authors—writers of literary fiction, poets, or playwrights—from these four traditions have Wikipedia pages in the others’ languages. We hypothesize that if an author from one literary tradition (e.g., Milan Kundera Czech writer) appears on a Wikipedia in another language (e.g., Polish), that author forms part of the literary memory of the second tradition. At the very least, information about the author is available in the most widely used encyclopedic resource in that language. Our methodology involves querying Wikidata, cleaning the data, creating network representations, and interpreting the results. This approach builds on the research direction outlined in the Journal of Cultural Analytics special issue on “Wikipedia, Wikidata, and World Literature,” adapting it to the Central European context (e.g. Fischer 2023, Rosendahl 2019). This research leverages a large dataset to offer new insights into the region’s literary interconnections, which have previously been studied primarily through individual and isolated examples. Network visualizations of the results enable both a comprehensive analysis of the region and a closer examination of specific literary relationships, revealing patterns and dynamics that have remained largely unexplored.
Keywords: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Visegrad countries, literary tradition, literary memory
Acknowledgement: Szemes Botond has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101186601.
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