Themes

One of the modules within our knowledge graph is focused on the extraction of topics in the full texts and of literary themes in the bibliographic metadata, a controlled vocabulary of thematic concepts being the intermediary between these sources.

To get an overview of thematic concepts within the whole domain of French novels 1751-1800 in the knowledge graph, we can formulate a query for all themes and visualise the results in a bubble chart.

All thematic concepts of the novels, visualised as a bubble chart

If a researcher is interested in compiling a corpus of novels on a certain themed, for example “travel”, “melancholy”, “philosophy” or “sentimentalism”, one can formulate this in a query and get all novels matching this criteria. We could also ask for all the authors which cover a certain theme, for example:

Which authors write about “sentimentalism”?

As publication places per novel are part of our properties, we could also combine the property of themes (P36 about) and (P10 place of publication) in the visual output of a map:

Show all the places of publication of novels which are about “travel” IMG

Combining themes and spaces in the graph, there is the property P32 narrative_location, which can show interesting patterns of correlations of spaces with themes in the French novel of that period.

Let’s see how the rather abstract location “rural area” is intertwined with concise thematic concepts in aggregating all novels and all themes with narrative location “rural area” in the graph.

Thematic concepts linked to the narrative location “rural area”

rural

As a result, we see that the thematic concepts “sentimentalism”, “sentiment” and “unhappiness” are linked to the narrative location “rural area” (in aggregating all novels).

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… MiMoTextBase: data.mimotext.uni-trier.de
… SPARQL-Endpoint: query.mimotext.uni-trier.de
… MiMoText project site: https://mimotext.uni-trier.de

If you are new to SPARQL, you can go through the (short)Tutorial,which will give you an overview of how to write basic queries based on examples inMiMoTextBase. It’s supposed to give newbies an introduction to SPARQL, but it cannot give you a deep knowledge of SPARQL – maybe theseresourcescan help you with that.

If you are interested in MiMoTextBase and its content onauthors,novels,spacesorthemesof the French novel in 1751-1800 with already some SPARQL knowledge, you can have a look at the links.

WithinGOING FURTHER there are some queries on the data containing overviews of items like dates of publication or themes changing over time and comparing the different sources of the data inMiMoTextBase together with some interpretation on the outcome which could show the potential of initial questions on further research.

If you want more detailed information about the structure and the aims of our tutorial, you can find it in theintroduction of the tutorial.Information on the infrastructure and the models behind MiMoTextBase you can findhere.

Having no results in the result table can have different reasons. A simple solution is to check whether the variables are spelled the same in the SELECT and the WHERE part of the query.

Another reason could be being too specific in the query. Not all items in MiMoTextBase contain all information on all properties due to its sources. So it can be helpful to add the OPTIONAL function on some of the properties in your query, seehere.

If you run into this error message, you probably have to group items. In the example below, we use the count function, but forgot to add GROUP BY.

Query to retrieve count of published works per author:

The solution is easy: We have to aggregate ?authorName by grouping. We can now get the results in descending order via order by desc(?count) and set a limit of 20 to get the top 20.

Query to retrieve authors with most novels published (top 20):

Sometimes you can get many results on a query which can slow down the result generation or impair the readability of some visualizations. In those cases you could add the LIMIT-operation (seehere)to only get the TOP x items or the HAVING COUNT-operation (seehere)if you want only results that lie above a certain threshold.

If some of the items appear more often in the results than they should, make sure you filter all labels for one language (FR, EN, DE) separately as the graph is multilingual and the output will represent all languages within the graph, seehere.

If you're looking for the right identifier for properties, novels, authors, themes or locations, the simplest way is to visitdata.mimotext.uni-trier.deand type in the label (for example “London” or “about” or “philosophy”) in the search bar. The numerical identifier of the property or the item is visible in the URL or behind the name of the item or the property.

You can also consult our lists of themes, locations and properties and their numerical identifier in the knowledge graph below.

List of properties

Query:Retrieve a list of all the properties used in this graph

List of themes

For a list of all thematic concepts in the graph, see thisquerywhich lists all thematic concepts and their Q-identifier, ordered by occurrence:

List of locations

For a list of all narrative places in the graph, see thisquerywhich lists all narrative places and their Q-Identifier, ordered by occurrence:

These queries list themes or locations ordered by occurrence. We recommend using items or properties which have a certain number of connections in the graph, in order to get good results (with enough data points).

There are several possible reasons for a slowdown or a timeout of your query. It could be that the quantity of results is very high, so you might limit the results to check if the syntax of the query is OK. This is done by using theLIMITparameter. The LIMIT tells the algorithm where to stop, so if you insert for example LIMIT 100 at the end of your query, it will stop after 100 results. This can be helpful for debugging.

Parameters which potentially slow down the query are DISTINCT or ORDER BY. A strategy might be to comment them out to see if these slow down your query.

If you have not used Wikidata, the SPARQL syntax or the RDF format before, we can recommend the Wikidata SPARQL Tutorial, Wikidata:SPARQL queries examples, the SPARQL Playground or this Wikidata Query Service Tutorial by Wikimedia Israel as helpful resources. Furthermore, we can recommend Bob du Charme’s book "Learning SPARQL" as well as his blog:

DuCharme, Bob. Learning SPARQL. Sebastopol, UNITED STATES: O’Reilly Media, 2013. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uni-trier/detail.action?docID=1250020.