World literature and Wikipedia, Journal of Cultural Analytics
This special issue seeks to invite scholars interested in using Wikipedia and related Linked Open Data projects as a new kind of source to study literary reception. The Wikipedia project as a general encyclopedia available in over 300 active languages contains a plethora of interlinked information on literary topics across languages and cultures, be it authors and their biographies, works, translations, prizes, or information on literary life. All this information is not only humanly readable, but also readable and analysable by machines. Semantisised linked-open-data versions of this vast multilingual digital encyclopedia, like Wikidata or DBpedia, have become a major instrument to achieve a measurability of popularity (or, centrality) across different languages. Only a few literary scholars have tried to make use of these tools as yet (see bibliography below).
Hundreds of millions of readers regularly consult Wikipedia in their native, or second or third language. Thanks to Wikipedia analytics, there is an immense data trove relating to the pages created, edited, and viewed in all of Wikipedia’s editions. This valuable data can not only pinpoint the global popularity of authors and texts, but give us finely-grained statistics about authors and texts in specific and limited linguistic and geographic contexts. More than this, however, using the resource of Wikipedia allows us to reshape current scholarship on literary canonicity and popularity, which is too often blinkered by abstract notions of influence and implicit bias. Despite the longstanding debate over the canon, what Wikipedia shows us is that there is no monolithic canon, but many canons, depending on the data you choose to examine. Is Shakespeare canonical? Sure, unless your corpus is the more than 100 Wikipedia editions without an entry on Shakespeare.
Contributions can address any topic in world literature, ranging from single works or authors to national and/or international literary contexts. Methodological reflections should be accompanied by interpretive approaches, always looking at both possibilities and limits of this particular object of study. Our hope is to establish that studying Wikipedia provides a meaningful addition to the discourse on world literature.
Guest editors are Frank Fischer (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), Jacob Blakesley (University of Leeds), Paula Wojcik (University of Vienna) and Robert Jäschke (Humboldt University of Berlin).
We invite submissions that address the following topics:
Wikipedia case studies (single authors or groups of authors, works, genres, languages, epochs)
Structural problems behind underrepresented entities in Wikipedia
Wikidata, DBpedia and the perspective of Linked Open Data in Literary Studies
Practical problems of scraping, pre-processing and measuring data from Wikipedia and its surrounding projects in order to prepare them for inquiries relevant to Literary Studies
Other related topics are also welcome. Please send your abstracts (300–400 words) and short bios to Frank Fischer (frank.fischer@dariah.eu) by September 15th, 2021. For reasons of retrievability, please use “World Literature” in the subject line of your email. You will receive notice on the acceptance of your proposal by October 15th 2021.Full-length articles of up to 8,000 words need to be prepared according to the author guidelines (https://culturalanalytics.org/for-authors) and will be due March 31st, 2022, to allow for a timely peer review of the articles.
For further inquiries, please contact guest editors Frank Fischer (frank.fischer@dariah.eu), Jacob Blakesley (J.Blakesley@leeds.ac.uk), Paula Wojcik (paula.wojcik@univie.ac.at) or Robert Jäschke (robert.jaeschke@hu-berlin.de).
Bibliography
Jacob Blakesley: The Global Popularity of William Shakespeare in 303 Wikipedias. In: Memoria di Shakespeare: A Journal of Shakespeare Studies (2018), pp. 149–171. DOI:10.13133/2283-8759/14509 
Jacob Blakesley: World Literature According to Wikipedia Popularity and Book Translations: The Case of Modern Italian Poets. In: Comparative Critical Studies (2020), 17.3: 433-458. DOI:10.3366/ccs.2020.0373
Lucas van der Deijl, Roel Smeets, Antal van den Bosch: The Canon of Dutch Literature According to Google. In: Journal of Cultural Analytics. September 24, 2019. DOI:10.22148/16.046
Christoph Hube, Frank Fischer, Robert Jäschke, Gerhard Lauer, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: World Literature According to Wikipedia: Introduction to a DBpedia-Based Framework. arXiv.org, 4 January 2017. arXiv:1701.00991
Paula Wojcik, Sophie Picard: Klassiker@wikipedia. Klassikforschung und digital humanities. Ein Kommentar zur Studie »World Literature According to Wikipedia«. In: Paula Wojcik, Stefan Matuschek, Sophie Picard, Monika Wolting: Klassik als kulturelle Praxis – funktional, intermedial, transkulturell. Berlin: De Gruyter 2019, pp. 151–166. DOI:10.1515/9783110615760-010