Linking Named Entities in Diderot's \textit{Encyclopédie} to Wikidata
This work addresses the lack of digital connection between historical and modern encyclopedias, enabling comparison and study of knowledge evolution, but it is incremental as it applies existing linking methods to new data.
The paper tackled the problem of digitally connecting Diderot's Encyclopédie to Wikidata by annotating over 10,300 entries with Wikidata identifiers, resulting in more than 2,600 links for locations and human entities and over 9,500 entries with geographic content.
Diderot's \textit{Encyclopédie} is a reference work from XVIIIth century in Europe that aimed at collecting the knowledge of its era. \textit{Wikipedia} has the same ambition with a much greater scope. However, the lack of digital connection between the two encyclopedias may hinder their comparison and the study of how knowledge has evolved. A key element of \textit{Wikipedia} is Wikidata that backs the articles with a graph of structured data. In this paper, we describe the annotation of more than 10,300 of the \textit{Encyclopédie} entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling us to connect these entries to the graph. We considered geographic and human entities. The \textit{Encyclopédie} does not contain biographic entries as they mostly appear as subentries of locations. We extracted all the geographic entries and we completely annotated all the entries containing a description of human entities. This represents more than 2,600 links referring to locations or human entities. In addition, we annotated more than 9,500 entries having a geographic content only. We describe the annotation process as well as application examples. This resource is available at https://github.com/pnugues/encyclopedie_1751