Jupyter notebook to retrieve and visualise article-level Wikipedia data

The collaboratively edited online encyclopaedia Wikipedia currently contains over 60 million articles in over 300 language editions, covering topics across many fields of knowledge. Scholars of reception-oriented literary studies have also discovered Wikipedia as a research topic and a data resource, as it collects encyclopaedic entries and metadata about literature, authors, literary works, genres, periods and other categories relevant to the history of literature.

Data-analytical evaluation of various Wikipedia metrics opens up an opportunity to empirically assess engagement with literature on Wikipedia and to further diversify statements about literary canonisation, valuation practices and popularity in the context of open encyclopaedia projects. This Jupyter notebook, developed by Research Area 5 Building Digital Communities of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities, is a user-friendly tool for retrieving and visualising article-level data from Wikipedia.

Work based on weltliteratur/fontane.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective – EXC 2020 – Project ID 390608380.