Let’s think about this some more…
This is such a rich topic that I’m going to break my answer up into multiple posts. Here’s the first with the simplest way to use Wikidata.
1. Can you find a way to identify other major works of fiction (leaving out fan-fiction for the moment) in which the names of “Starbuck” and “Queequeg” appear (either independently or together)?
As I mentioned, there’s in an entire Wikidata collection underneath Wikipedia. Of course, the easiest way to get to the things we care about is by a direct query:
[ wikidata Starbuck -Starbucks ]
which gives 60 results in Wikidata that have different versions of the term “Starbuck.” (Note that I used the minus operator, -Starbucks, to get rid of all the hits with “Starbucks” in the results.)
As you can see, there are a lot of results here for “Starbuck” as a place, a person’s name, and so on. But the most interesting result here is the one that says “Wikipedia(20 entries).”
- Starbuck, a character in the novel Moby-Dick
- Starbuck, a character in Fire Bringer (a YA fantasy novel)
- Starbuck, a character in The Rainmaker (a play from 1954) by N. Richard Nash, later made into a movie
- Starbuck, a character in the 1956 film adaptation, The Rainmaker
- Starbuck, a character in The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
- Lieutenant Starbuck, a character in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica film and television series
- Kara Thrace or “Starbuck”, a character in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica television series (note that this is a DIFFERENT character from the 1978 series… should it really count?)
- Dana Scully, or “Starbuck” as she was nicknamed by her father, from The X-Files TV series
- Starbuck (film), a 2011 Canadian comedy
- J.J. Starbuck, a US crime drama series from 1987
- Starbuck, a Belgian comic series created by author Philippe Foerster
- Starbuck, a Canadian film ( 2011 ) directed by Ken Scott and starring Patrick Huard
- The Starbuck Chronicles – a series of historical novels by Bernard Cornwell
- Elon Cody Starbuck , character from Howard Chaykin’s comic book Star Reach
- Walter F. Starbuck is a character in Kurt Vonnegut ‘s novel Jailbird
Obviously, I could do the same thing with the name Queequeg, but I’ll leave that as an assignment for the reader. Can you find all of the other languages that mention Queequeg and then open all of those pages to scan for additional mentions in other works?
