BookSampo – a Linked Data (LD) service and portal for Finnish Fiction Literature – was launched in 2011 by the Public Libraries of Finland. Since then, the original knowledge graph (KG) has grown from 400 000 subjects to over 8 740 000, including literary works, authors, book covers, reviews, literary awards, along with other detailed semantic metadata.
In this talk, we present a new user interface which allows the user to explore Finnish literature from different perspectives with the help of faceted search options for filtering the data set. The user interface also offers different ways of visualizing these results through different chart types and maps as well as individual instance pages for viewing detailed information on objects.
From the perspective of digital literary studies, we present examples of what the BookSampo KG can tell about the development of Finnish fiction literature in the past decades. Our quantitative results show how literary trends flow across borders and illustrate how author gender and genre might affect publication decisions.
Moreover, we critically discuss some of the challenges working with the BookSampo KG has revealed concerning the annotation quality, and how these issues could be addressed in the future. Finally, we discuss the potential BookSampo has to offer for future explorations, using semantic computing technologies. Project Webpage.
Aalto HELDIG DH pizza seminar on Friday 9 December 2022 at 12.00.