The Under-Represented Writers Knowledge Graph is a dataset of writers and their works created for exploring the under-representation of non-Western writers in the digital environment.
Writers are clustered in two groups: Western and Transnational. Such a distinction is based on two criteria: the country of birth, that must be a former colony with a high or lower Human Development Index, and the belonging to an ethnic minority.
In addition, two dates were considered to classify writers:
- 1808, namely the year when the Spanish American wars of independence began. This date is used as a boundary for the entire corpus. Only writers born since 1808 are considered, and only the ones born in Latin America and Caribbean are labeled as ‘Transnational’ from this date.
- 1917, the year when Wilson’s Fourteen points were outlined. African and Asian authors born from this date are labeled as ‘Transnational’
The dataset includes 194,065 authors with a Wikidata page. Among them, 17,368 are labeled as ‘Transnational’ and 176,697 as ‘Western’.
Works are categorized consequently and they are gathered from Wikidata, Open Library and Goodreads. In the table below it is possible to observe the distribution of works in the Knowledge Graph.
| Source of Knowledge | Western works | Transnational works |
| Wikidata | 136,995 | 8,380 |
| Open Library | 824,378 | 66,050 |
| Goodreads | 152,468 | 37,680 |
How to explore the Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph is publicly available at the following SPARQL endpoint: https://kgccc.di.unito.it/sparql/urwriters
Below, it is possible to directly access to some ready-made queries.