---
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- en
tags:
- knowledge-graph
- intellectual-history
- marxism
- political-philosophy
- computational-humanities
- temporal-graph
task_categories:
- text-classification
- graph-ml
pretty_name: MarxGraph
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
---

# MarxGraph: A Temporal Knowledge Graph of Marxist Intellectual History

MarxGraph traces how core concepts in Marxist theory (class struggle, the
vanguard party, imperialism, permanent revolution, and 40+ others) were
inherited, extended, contested, or rejected as they moved from Marx and
Engels through Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao. Unlike a simple
"who-influenced-whom" graph, every edge in MarxGraph is grounded in a specific
textual claim with a verbatim evidence span, and the dataset explicitly
distinguishes **documentary facts** (what a text says) from **interpretive
judgments** (how a later thinker's treatment relates to an earlier one); the
latter always carrying a `perspective` and `confidence` field rather than
being asserted as settled fact.

## Dataset summary

| | |
|---|---|
| Works | 50 |
| Passages | ~14,862 |
| Concept mentions | 21,933 |
| Claims (with evidence spans) | 71,572 |
| Explicit references/citations | 19,471 |
| Concept-evolution edges | 446 |
| Thinkers | Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao |
| Traditions | Classical Marxism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism |

Source texts: the [Marxists Internet Archive](https://www.marxists.org).

## Dataset structure

Six linked tables (Parquet):

| File | Grain | Key columns |
|---|---|---|
| `works.parquet` | one work | `work_id`, `author`, `title`, `year`, `tradition`, `license`, `source_url` |
| `passages.parquet` | ~220-word passage | `passage_id`, `work_id`, `chapter`, `text` |
| `concept_mentions.parquet` | one mention | `passage_id`, `concept`, `surface_form` |
| `claims.parquet` | one proposition | `claim_id`, `claim`, `concepts`, `evidence_span`, `confidence` |
| `references.parquet` | explicit citation/attack | `work_id`, `target_thinker`, `stance`, `evidence_span` |
| `concept_evolution.parquet` | concept × (earlier, later) author pair | `transformation`, `rationale`, `confidence`, `perspective` |

Plus a graph export (`graph/marxgraph.graphml`, `graph/marxgraph.jsonl`) built
from the tables above: thinkers, works, claims, and concepts as nodes;
`WROTE`, `CONTAINS`, `MENTIONS`, citation-stance, and `TRANSFORMS_<label>`
edges.

### Transformation labels

Each `concept_evolution` row classifies how a concept changed between two
chronologically-ordered thinkers:

- `PRESERVED`: restated with essentially the same content and scope
- `EXTENDED`: same core meaning, new components or scope added
- `REFORMULATED`: same term, different core content or theoretical role
- `CONTEXTUALIZED`: adapted to new historical/national conditions
- `CONTESTED`: later thinker explicitly argues against the earlier treatment
- `REJECTED`: concept abandoned or repudiated
- `INSUFFICIENT`: evidence too thin to support any label (the model declines
  to force a verdict rather than fabricate one)

Distribution across the 446 edges: 76.0% EXTENDED, 10.1% CONTEXTUALIZED, 6.3%
REFORMULATED, 4.7% CONTESTED, 2.0% PRESERVED, 0.7% INSUFFICIENT, 0.2% REJECTED.

## Construction

Built with a five-stage pipeline (full code included):
EPUB download → passage segmentation → LLM claim/mention/reference extraction
→ LLM concept-transformation typing (constrained to a documented set of
plausible lineage pairs) → graph assembly. Primary extraction model:
`openai/gpt-oss-120b` via Groq. See `README.md` in the code repository for the
full pipeline and `config/ontology.yaml` for the entity/relation schema.

## Validation

100 claims and 50 evolution edges were checked against a stratified sample
protocol, with an automated first pass followed by domain-expert human
adjudication of every uncertain case. **Result: 99% claims accuracy (99/100),
100% evolution-edge coherence (50/50)** on the reviewed sample. Full
methodology, including the one documented failure case and important caveats
about sample size and the narrowness of the model's confidence scores, is in
[`VALIDATION.md`](VALIDATION.md); please read it before citing accuracy
figures out of context.

## Known limitations

- **Confidence scores are not calibrated.** Evolution-edge confidence values
  cluster tightly (mean 0.852, std 0.035) and should not be used as a
  reliability filter.
- **A likely duplicate work has not yet been removed.** Trotsky's *History of
  the Russian Revolution* appears to be ingested twice (single-file and
  3-volume editions), inflating Trotsky's claim counts on affected concepts.
  A deduplication tool (`src/dedupe_works.py`) exists but has not been applied
  to this release.
- **Interpretive edges are one LLM-assisted reading, not a canonical verdict.**
  Especially for ideologically contested relationships (e.g., Stalin's
  relationship to Lenin, or Trotsky's to Stalin), different traditions
  characterize continuity/rupture differently. Treat `CONTESTED`/`REJECTED`
  labels as a documented, evidence-linked interpretation, open to challenge,
  not as settled historiography.
- **Extraction quality reflects the extraction model.** `openai/gpt-oss-120b`
  is far smaller than frontier models; the validation pass documents at least
  one case of the model adding a plausible but unsupported evaluative gloss
  to an otherwise accurate paraphrase.
- **Licensing is mixed at the work level.** `works.parquet.license` marks each
  work `pd` (public domain, safe to redistribute as text) or `verify` (check
  the specific translation/edition's copyright status on MIA before
  redistributing raw text; this applies especially to some Stalin, Mao, and
  Luxemburg translations). Annotations (claims, relations, evolution edges)
  are original analysis and released under this dataset's license regardless
  of source-text status.

## Citation

If you use MarxGraph, please cite the dataset directly:

```
Bose, J. (2026). MarxGraph: A Temporal Knowledge Graph of Marxist Intellectual
History [Dataset]. Hugging Face. https://huggingface.co/datasets/<your-repo-id>
```

## Credits

Source texts: [Marxists Internet Archive](https://www.marxists.org), a
volunteer-run archive; please support their work if you can.

Dataset construction, ontology design, and validation: Joy Bose
(joy.bose@ieee.org).