The Sagenjager was developed in cooperation with Oneindig Noord-Holland.

Read more about it here (NWO) or here (Oneindig Noord-Holland); both in Dutch. The newspaper Het Parool also ran a nice article about it.

The next step is to create a Frysian version of the Sagenjager.

Friday 13 December 2013, Meertens Institute (registration is closed)

Sponsored by NWO CATCH

Theme: Patterns in Narrative Texts

Many a collection of Cultural Heritage Institutions consists mainly of historical and contemporary texts. To extract information from such large corpora, various text processing techniques are available. A special challenge is formed by the large subset of textual data that take on a narrative form. What distinguishes such narrative texts from factual reports is that they are typically multi-layered, and studying these layers can tell us much about the author’s mentality and beliefs, as well as other important cultural and historical information. To explore narrative corpora and disclose the deeper information they contain, new text mining methods must be developed. The afternoon will revolve around big data of language, narratives, and folklore, with a focus on finding significant patterns, themes and motifs within these data. The data that will be discussed range from narrative journalistic texts to orally transmitted folktales. In the study of history, diachronic corpora can be mined to discover how historical events are reflected in language use. In folk narrative research, patterns of interest include the stability and variability of ‘narrative building blocks’ (motifs, memes) in oral transmission, and geographical dispersion of folk beliefs in the supernatural. Establishing links between narrative texts is a common factor in all this research.

Guest speakers: Tim Tangherlini (University of California), Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (Meertens Institute)

Detailed programme:

12.00 – 13.30 Lunch (There is an opportunity to take a guided tour through the Meertens Instituut as well)

13.30 – 13.35 Word of welcome by Hans Bennis 13.35 – 13.50 Word of welcome by Jaap van den Herik

13.50 – 14.00 Introduction on Patterns in Narrative Texts and on the Dutch Folktale Database by Theo Meder

14.00 – 14.15 Dolf Trieschnigg: Learning to Extract Folktale Keywords

14.15 – 14.30 Dong Nguyen: Folktale Classification using Learning to Rank

14.30 – 15.15 Mike Kestemont & Folgert Karsdorp: Mining the Twentieth Century’s History from the TIME Magazine

15.15 – 16.00 Tea break with poster presentations and demonstrations:

•  Dutch Folktale Database/FACT
•  Tunes & Tales
•  TINPOT
•  Nederlab
•  CLARIAH
•  e-Humanities
•  Riddle of Literary Quality

16.00 – 17.00 Tim Tangherlini: Tools of the WitchHunter: hGIS and Network Classifiers for the Study of Folklore.

17.00 – 18.00 Drinks

Members of the first session of the ISFNR-panel in Vilnius – from left to right: Cliona O’Carroll, Christoph Schmitt, Theo Meder, Emili Samper, and Carme Oriol. (Photo by Mereie de Jong)

At the conference of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) in Vilnius, Lithuania, Theo Meder organized a panel called ‘Folk Narrative in the Modern World: Computers and the Internet’ on Wednesday, June 25^th, 2013. The panel was divided into two sessions of four papers:

1. Theo Meder (Meertens Instituut, AMSTERDAM, Netherlands): ‘A Scientific Folktale Database should be more than an Online Museum of Stories’.
2. Carme Oriol & Emili Samper (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, TARRAGONA, Spain): ‘Catalan folk literature today: research database on the Internet’.
3. Christoph Schmitt (Institut für Volkskunde, ROSTOCK, Germany): ‘Belief Narratives in Online Databases. Retrieval scenarios and the problem of internationally valid indexing, based on the example of the ‘WossiDiA’ project’.
4. Cliona O’Carroll (University College Cork, CORK, Ireland): ‘Remembering and inhabiting the city through digital storytelling: The Cork Memory Map’.
5. Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska & J. Andrew Ross (Lodz University, LODZ, Poland & formerly Oxford University, SCHWETZINGEN, Germany): ‘Global Cooking Stories and the Internet’.
6. Maria Yelenevskaya (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, HAIFA, Israel): ‘Nomads Online: Travel Notes in the Cyber Age’.
7. Daria Radchenko (independent scholar, MOSCOW, Russian Federation): ‘’_ and nothing ever happened’: Parodies and Jokes About Chain Letters on the Internet’.
8. Andres Kuperjanov & Mare Kõiva (Literary Museum, TARTU, Estonia: ‘Giant lore: further thoughts on transmedial narratives’.

The first three papers were dealing in particular with the problems and possibilities of online folktale databases. One of the purposes of the panel was to discuss the need and conditions for a future international harvester that would enable researchers to perform comparative research by performing queries in several databases simultaneously.

The panel was visited by approximately 30 international colleagues, and one of the scholars entering the disussion was Lauri Harvilahti from the University of Helsinki, Finland. It turned out that his presentation on the very next conference of the Société Internationale d’Etnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) in Tartu, Estonia on July 1 was in several ways rather similar to the paper by Theo Meder in Vilnius. At the General Meeting of the SIEF Harvilahti founded a new working group called ‘Archives’ that – among other things – would deal with digital archives as well. Theo Meder volunteered to become a member of this working group. At the SIEF conference, Meder was in a smaller panel called ‘Everyday Names, Tales, Songs and Play: Continuous Traditions in a Changing World’ on July 1, and he presented a paper called ‘Damsels in Distress in Recent Fairy Tale Movies’.

Furthermore, Meder presented a small report of the committee for ‘Folktales and the Internet’ at the General Assembly of the ISFNR. He urged all of his colleagues to fill in the FACT leaflet, so that they could participate in an online survey later this year.

TM

English: New York Times – New Scientist – United Press International

Dutch: UT Nieuws – Twittermania – Volkskrant

The original research paper, to be presented at ICWSM-2013 in Boston this summer, can be found here.

As lead researcher Dong Nguyen explains in UT Nieuws, Twitter and other social media offer a new platform for transmission of folktales such as contempory legends. Being able to automatically determine age and gender will help us to investigate transmission within various groups – young and old, male and female.

Dong Nguyen on stage giving her talk.

Djoerd Hiemstra at Dolf Trieschnigg’s poster.