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The Theme Ontology Project is an open access, community-based fiction studies undertaking to
- define common literary themes (or "themes" for short),
- classify defined themes into a hierarchically structured controlled-vocabulary, and
- annotate works of fiction with the themes within a collaborative framework.
The name Literary Theme Ontology (LTO) is used to refer to the hierarchically structured collection of literary themes. The current developmental version of the LTO contains roughly 3,000 carefully defined themes. To date upwards of 4,000 stories (e.g., films, novels, TV series episodes, video game plots, etc.) have been annotated with LTO themes. Data from this repository can easily be incorporated into https://www.themeontology.org/. There it can be examined in various ways. This tells us interesting things about the kind of stories we humans invent. Theming is also a good personal way to reflect on what really goes on in the stories we enjoy.
- What is a Story?
- What is a Literary Theme?
- What is the Literary Theme Ontology?
- What Distinguishes a Central Theme from a Peripheral Theme?
- Theming Andrew Lang's Little Red Riding-Hood
- How do I Find Themes once I've Identified a Topic?
- What if no Theme Fits my Identified Topic?
- What if I have a Quibble about an Existing Theme?
- Collaborative Theming Guidelines
- File Types
- Directory Structure
- GitHub Branching Model
- Story Data
- Collection Data
- Theme Data
- Versioning
There is no shortage of ways for you to contribute to the project.
The thing you'll want to do is to fork the repository as described in this GitHub help page.
The main way to contribute is by familiarizing yourself with the nuts and blots of how to thematically annotate stories, as described in this wiki, and then have fun theming what ever stories you please. It's always a good idea to thematically annotate stories in collaboration with others, if you can. Thematically annotated stories can be merged to the original project repository using pull requests.
Other ways you can contribute to the project include,
- Improving on the stories that already exist in the database by 1) polishing up theme comments, 2) adding new themes, 3) raising issues to flag misapplied themes, and so on.
- Improving on theme descriptions in particular, and theme entry contents in general.
- Improve on existing story descriptions.
For those interested contributing on higher level work, including LTO hierarchical organization, email Paul Sheridan with your GitHub user name to become a project contributor.
