Wikidata driven timeline

I have been to a couple of wikidata workshops recently, both involving Ewan McAndrew; between which I read Christine de Pizan‘s Book of the City of Ladies(*). Christine de Pizan is described as one of the first women in Europe to earn her living as a writer, which made me wonder what other female writers were around at that time (e.g. Julian of Norwich and, err…). So, at the second of these workshops, I took advantage of Ewan’s expertise, and the additional bonus of Navino Evans cofounder of Histropedia  also being there, to create a timeline of medieval European female writers.  (By the way, it’s interesting to compare this to Asian female writers–I was interested in Christina de Pizan and wanted to see how she fitted in with others who might have influenced her or attitudes to her, and so didn’t think that Chinese and Japanese writers fitted into the same timeline.)

This generated from a SPARQL query:

#Timeline of medieval european female writers
#defaultView:Timeline
SELECT ?person ?personLabel ?birth_date ?death_date ?country (SAMPLE(?image) AS ?image) WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q36180; # find everything that is a writer
          wdt:P21 wd:Q6581072. # ...and a human female
  OPTIONAL{?person wdt:P2031 ?birth_date} # use florit if present for birth/death dates  
  OPTIONAL{?person wdt:P2032 ?death_date} # as some v impecise dates give odd results 
  ?person wdt:P570 ?death_date. # get their date of death
  OPTIONAL{?person wdt:P569 ?birth_date} # get their birth date if it is there
  ?person wdt:P27 ?country.   # get there country
  ?country wdt:P30  wd:Q46.   # we want country to be part of Europe
  FILTER (year(?death_date) < 1500) FILTER (year(?death_date) > 600)
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  OPTIONAL { ?person wdt:P18 ?image. }
}
GROUP BY ?person ?personLabel ?birth_date ?death_date ?country
Limit 100

[run it on wikidata query service]

Reflections

I’m still trying to get my head around SPARQL, Ewan and Nav helped a lot, but I wouldn’t want to pass this off as exemplary SPARQL. In particular, I have no idea how to optimise SPARQL queries, and the way I get birth_date and death_date to be the start and end of when the writer flourished, if that data is there, seems a bit fragile.

It was necessary to to use florit dates because some of the imprecise birth & death dates lead to very odd timeline displays: born C12th . died C13th showed as being alive for 200 years.

There were other oddities in the wikidata. When I first tried, Julian of Norwich didn’t appear because she was a citizen of the Kingdom of England, which wasn’t listed as a country in Europe. Occitania, on the other hand was.  That was fixed. More difficult was a writer from Basra who was showing up because Basra was in the Umayyad Caliphate, which included Spain and so was classed as a European country. Deciding what we mean by European has never been easy.

Given the complexities of the data being represented, it’s no surprise that the Wikidata data model isn’t simple. In particular I found that dealing with qualifiers for properties was mind bending (especially with another query I tried to write).

Combining my novice level of SPARQL and the complexity of the Wikidata data model, I could definitely see the need for SPARQL tutorials that go beyond the simple “here’s how you find triple that matches a pattern” level.

Finally: histropedia is pretty cool.

Footnote:

The Book of the City of Ladies is a kind of women in red for Medieval Europe.  Rosalind Brown-Grant’s translation for Penguin Classics is very readable.

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