Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata

One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps b...

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Autor principal: Melanie Conroy
Formato: Artigo
Idioma:English
Publicado em: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University 2023-05-01
coleção:Journal of Cultural Analytics
Acesso em linha:https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.74068
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author Melanie Conroy
author_facet Melanie Conroy
author_sort Melanie Conroy
collection DOAJ
description One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.
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spelling doaj.art-e21a6366a9994d028bf88d61068ed2ed2024-09-12T22:52:39ZengDepartment of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill UniversityJournal of Cultural Analytics2371-45492023-05-0182Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ WikidataMelanie ConroyOne of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.74068
spellingShingle Melanie Conroy
Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata
Journal of Cultural Analytics
title Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata
title_full Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata
title_fullStr Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata
title_full_unstemmed Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata
title_short Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata
title_sort quantifying the gap the gender gap in french writers wikidata
url https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.74068
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