Constructing the GOLEM: Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models
Creators: name: Pianzola, Federico
name: Yang, Xiaoyan
name: Visser, Noa
name: van der Ree, Michiel
name: van Cranenburgh, Andreas
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: computational literary studies
digital humanities
knowledge graph
formal ontology
fanfiction

description: This paper presents the first release of a graph database of online fiction corpora taken from various sources in five different languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, Korean). The goal is to describe texts using “derived data” (OECD, 2005) – or “mesodata” (Boot, 2009) – referring to various textual features, so that comparisons between documents could be done without accessing the full text of the documents. The idea is similar to that of the HathiTrust Extracted Features dataset (Jett et al., 2020), but the features encoded in the GOLEM project (“Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models”) are much richer and also refer to narrative and stylistic elements and to reader response data (e.g. characters, relationships, topics, readability, sentiment of comments received by the story, etc.) collected from likes and comments left on the stories. Something similar has already been done on a smaller scale for a selection of texts in English (Piper, 2022) and Dutch (Luoto and van Cranenburgh, 2021). The creation of the GOLEM has been inspired by such work but will operate on a completely different scale, which requires the automation of the extraction of textual features for millions of stories. The core concept of the GOLEM infrastructure is that of “programmable corpora”, i.e. “research-oriented corpora providing an API” (Fischer et al., 2019), which allows to easily reapply scripts, notebooks, and pipelines of analysis to all texts in the corpora, inasmuch as they are encoded following the same principles and can be queried via the same API and SPARQL endpoint. Since the GOLEM focuses primarily on derived data, there is no need for a resource-intensive XML database of texts encoded in TEI. Only statements about the texts and their reception will be stored in the database, following existing ontologies as closely as possible in order to maximize the compatibility with other relevant projects, like Wikidata and MiMoText (Schöch et al., 2022). Beside choosing three of the most spoken Western languages, Korean and Indonesian have been included because these cultures have a peculiar role in the worldwide digital reading landscape. On one hand, K-pop and K-drama inspire many works of fanfiction in all the mentioned languages, and are quite influential among youth, particularly in Europe. On the other hand, the Indonesian case is extremely important to understand the evolution of fiction more broadly, because it is culturally very distant from all the other considered countries (Muthukrishna et al., 2020) and Korean culture is very influential among Indonesian youth. Hence, it will be interesting to compare how cultural traits spread differently in countries with different wealth, educational level, and cultural influence. Moreover, Indonesia is a densely populated developing country in which for many people it is easier to access online fiction than print books (Rokib, 2019; Yoesoef, 2020) thus it offers a lot of data. Once metadata and derived data for all texts will be included, the GOLEM will be an almost complete database of all fanfiction published online in English, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, and Korean during the years 2000-2022, which correspond to almost the whole lifetime of the genre of online fanfiction. As such, the GOLEM will be an excellent resource to test hypothesis about the evolution of fiction writing and reader response without the influence of external factors like the historical selection by publishers or educational curricula. 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