The Literary Theme Ontology for Media Annotation and Information Retrieval
This addresses the problem of inconsistent terminology for literary scholars and researchers using collaborative or algorithmic methods on large fiction corpora, but it is incremental as it builds on existing literary theory.
The authors tackled the need for shared terminology in computational literary analysis by introducing the Literary Theme Ontology, a first draft collection of themes drawn from various sources and made available under an open license.
Literary theme identification and interpretation is a focal point of literary studies scholarship. Classical forms of literary scholarship, such as close reading, have flourished with scarcely any need for commonly defined literary themes. However, the rise in popularity of collaborative and algorithmic analyses of literary themes in works of fiction, together with a requirement for computational searching and indexing facilities for large corpora, creates the need for a collection of shared literary themes to ensure common terminology and definitions. To address this need, we here introduce a first draft of the Literary Theme Ontology. Inspired by a traditional framing from literary theory, the ontology comprises literary themes drawn from the authors own analyses, reference books, and online sources. The ontology is available at https://github.com/theme-ontology/lto under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).