[Paper Review] The Literary Theme Ontology for Media Annotation and Information Retrieval

Paul Sheridan, Mikael Onsjö+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|May 1, 2019

Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies33 references4 citations

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Literary Theme Ontology (LTO), a BFO-compliant, OWL2-encoded ontology of 2,875 literary themes derived from science fiction media including Star Trek, classic films, Black Mirror, and Futurama. It enables standardized, computable annotation and information retrieval for digital literary studies, with the goal of becoming a community-driven standard for thematic analysis of stories across genres and media types.

ABSTRACT

Literary theme identification and interpretation is a focal point of literary studies scholarship. Classical forms of literary scholarship, such as close reading, have flourished with scarcely any need for commonly defined literary themes. However, the rise in popularity of collaborative and algorithmic analyses of literary themes in works of fiction, together with a requirement for computational searching and indexing facilities for large corpora, creates the need for a collection of shared literary themes to ensure common terminology and definitions. To address this need, we here introduce a first draft of the Literary Theme Ontology. Inspired by a traditional framing from literary theory, the ontology comprises literary themes drawn from the authors own analyses, reference books, and online sources. The ontology is available at https://github.com/theme-ontology/lto under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

Motivation & Objective

• To address the lack of a standardized, computable framework for literary themes in digital literary studies.
• To create a shared, community-driven ontology that supports consistent annotation and information retrieval across diverse story corpora.
• To bridge the gap between informal literary theme lists and formal ontologies by integrating classical literary theory with computational needs.
• To establish a foundation for interoperability with other media and knowledge representation ontologies in the humanities.
• To enable scalable, collaborative curation of literary themes through a GitHub-based workflow and a future Wikipedia-style community platform.

Proposed method

• The LTO is developed using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper-level ontology and encoded in the Web Ontology Language (OWL2) for computational expressivity and reasoning.
• Themes were collected through systematic viewing and thematic analysis of 500 pre-Star Trek science fiction films (1895–1973), 100 post-1974 science fiction films, and modern series like Black Mirror and Futurama.
• The ontology integrates both subjects and classical literary themes under a unified concept of 'literary theme' to simplify classification and retrieval.
• The LTO includes relations such as 'is-about' to link thematic concepts to processual entities (e.g., 'shrinking' as a process linked to 'miniaturization technology' and 'what if I shrank in size').
• The project uses a GitHub-based collaborative workflow with pull requests for contributions, and plans to evolve into a Wikipedia-style community platform for thematic curation.
• The ontology is designed to support future logical definitions and integration with existing media ontologies like OntoMedia for enhanced semantic interoperability.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can a standardized, computable representation of literary themes be developed to support information retrieval and annotation in digital literary studies?
• RQ2 To what extent can a unified ontology of literary themes be constructed that encompasses both subjects and classical literary themes, despite their theoretical distinction?
• RQ3 What is the feasibility and impact of using a community-driven, collaborative model for curating and evolving a literary theme ontology?
• RQ4 How can the LTO be integrated with existing media and knowledge representation ontologies to enable cross-domain semantic reasoning?
• RQ5 What role can formal ontologies play in advancing large-scale, algorithmic analysis of narrative content in fiction?

Key findings

• The Literary Theme Ontology (LTO) version 0.3.1 contains 2,875 literary themes, covering a broad range of genres and media types, with a primary focus on science fiction.
• The LTO is implemented in OWL2 and compliant with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), enabling formal reasoning and integration into knowledge graphs.
• The ontology unifies the treatment of subjects and literary themes under a single conceptual framework, enhancing consistency in thematic annotation.
• The LTO supports advanced querying through relations such as 'is-about', allowing users to link thematic concepts to processual or technological entities.
• The project has established a GitHub-based collaborative development model with a structured workflow for contributions, including theme proposals and story annotations.
• The long-term vision includes transforming the Theme Ontology website into a community-driven, Wikipedia-style platform for collaborative curation of literary themes and annotated stories.