cultural-ai/wordsmatter: Words Matter: a knowledge graph of contentious terms

The choice of words describing cultural heritage can cause debates. It is especially sensitive when artefacts relate to different cultures and peoples who have been historically marginalised. Words chosen by archivists or curators may transmit stereotypes. The cultural heritage community has produced knowledge on potentially stereotyping and offensive terminology in heritage collections. At the same time, their knowledge is difficult to incorporate into existing online collections unless this knowledge is structured and machine-readable.

The Words Matter Knowledge Graph represents domain expert knowledge on discussions about contentious terminology in the cultural sector. In the knowledge graph, 75 English and 83 Dutch contentious terms are linked to explanations of their usage and suggested alternatives from domain experts. There are also related matches between contentious terms and sources from external datasets: Wikidata, Princeton WordNet, Open Dutch WordNet, and Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus.

This Zenodo publication includes the CULCO scheme used to model contentious terms in the knowledge graph. The scheme documentation is available on a separate page.

This knowledge graph is based on the publication “Words Matter: An Unfinished Guide to Word Choices in the Cultural Sector” by the National Museum of World Cultures (NMVW). 

Read more about this work in the paper "A Knowledge Graph of Contentious Terminology for Inclusive Representation of Cultural Heritage" (2023) by Andrei Nesterov, Laura Hollink, Marieke van Erp & Jacco van Ossenbruggen.

In this version:

• the CULCO scheme documentation is updated
• versioning is fixed
• typos are corrected