Canons Across Time: Compiling Lists of Ancient Authors with Wikidata

Canons are lists. When studying the processes of canon formation, one is therefore inevitably faced with the difficulties of compiling lists. In this paper, we present three case studies in which Wikidata was used to elaborate lists of Ancient Greek and Latin authors to trace their presence in different corpora: contemporary academic articles, 20th-century French press, and Early Modern print. Detailing workflows to retrieve, enrich, or reconcile the data available on various databases, this contribution illustrates the possibilities and challenges presented by Wikidata when building transferable methodologies for canonisation studies.

Declaration on AI

During the preparation of this code, the authors used the models ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, Claude Sonet 4.5, and Copilot 4, in order to draft code, debug errors, and improve code efficiency. The authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the publication’s content.