The URW-KG: a Resource for Tackling the Underrepresentation of non-Western Writers
This addresses the problem of digital discrimination for scholars and users in literary discovery, though it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge graphs.
The paper tackled the underrepresentation of non-Western writers in digital archives by creating the Under-Represented Writers Knowledge Graph (URW-KG), which integrates data from multiple sources, and experiments showed it improves exposure to non-Western literary works compared to using Wikidata alone.
Digital media have enabled the access to unprecedented literary knowledge. Authors, readers, and scholars are now able to discover and share an increasing amount of information about books and their authors. Notwithstanding, digital archives are still unbalanced: writers from non-Western countries are less represented, and such a condition leads to the perpetration of old forms of discrimination. In this paper, we present the Under-Represented Writers Knowledge Graph (URW-KG), a resource designed to explore and possibly amend this lack of representation by gathering and mapping information about works and authors from Wikidata and three other sources: Open Library, Goodreads, and Google Books. The experiments based on KG embeddings showed that the integrated information encoded in the graph allows scholars and users to be more easily exposed to non-Western literary works and authors with respect to Wikidata alone. This opens to the development of fairer and effective tools for author discovery and exploration.