Multilingual Crosswalks for Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage: Mapping China’s UNESCO-Inscribed Elements Across Wikidata, LCSH, and Getty AAT

Abstract

Forty-four Chinese United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-inscribed intangible cultural heritage (ICH) elements were examined against three very different systems: Wikidata, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (Getty AAT). The issue was not simply whether these systems contained the terms, but how inscription-level heritage concepts were transformed once they entered systems built around different conceptual units. A manual crosswalk audit coded each case as exact, close, broad, narrow, related, or no direct match. The resulting pattern was uneven, though not in any simple “covered versus missing” sense. Wikidata most often preserved a named element in recognizable form. LCSH more often lacked a direct subject heading. Getty AAT frequently offered a usable concept, but usually at a higher and more generic level, making broadening common. The more stable cases involved bounded forms and festivals. More difficult cases included practice clusters, ritual complexes, knowledge formations, and safeguarding strategies. These cases did not simply disappear. More often, they were retained only in reduced form or shifted into adjacent categories that captured them only partially. In this corpus, the central problem is less one of simple absence than of conceptual displacement across systems organized around different descriptive units.