Festivities at the edge of data: an interdisciplinary study of Andean festivals in wikidata

Abstract

This article examines how two Andean ritual traditions, Qoyllur Rit’i and the Virgen del Carmen of Paucartambo, are structurally represented within Wikidata. Using a compact knowledge graph extracted from Wikidata through ritual, geographic, heritage, and classificatory relations, we combine Louvain community detection, k-core coreness, and complementary network measures to analyze their relational embedding. The results show a tension between two forms of computational visibility. Qoyllur Rit’i is associated with a broader national-regional cluster but remains outside the innermost structural core, while the Virgen del Carmen of Paucartambo appears in a small ritual-specific community and occupies an outer core level. Institutional and geopolitical entities, together with heritage-classification entities, occupy the structural core of the graph. We interpret these patterns not as direct measures of cultural significance, but as evidence of how Wikidata’s semantic model, classification properties, linking practices, and editorial accumulation make some cultural relations more visible than others. The paper contributes to digital humanities and critical heritage studies by showing how graph analysis can serve as a diagnostic tool for examining the limits of linked open data in representing ritual practices, collective memory, and embodied forms of cultural knowledge.