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.

The Café Scientifique is an international initiative to host presentations by scientists from different domains in an informal environment. Amsterdam’s Café Scientifique is organized by students of the University of Amsterdam. For their evening on “Computer Music”, they invited me to speak on computational analysis of music. I explained probabilistic models such as Markov chains, which have played an important role both in automatic composition and in analysis of music. Finally, I showed how I apply these models for my research on the Dutch Song Database.

Among the other guests were Tijs Ham from the Utrecht Conservatory, who performed some music with Live Coding; Jos Zwaanenburg en Stephan Raidl from the Amsterdam Conservatory, who presented interactions between acoustic and electronic instruments; and Alex van Venrooij from the Department for Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, who spoke about the spread of electronic music in Europe and the United States.

It was a varied evening with a round of questions in the end for all presenters and performers, and it was a great experience to speak to such a mixed audience.

Dong Nguyen on stage giving her talk.

Djoerd Hiemstra at Dolf Trieschnigg’s poster.

Abstract
Folk narratives are a valuable resource for humanities and social science researchers. This paper focuses on automatically recognizing folk narrative genres, such as urban legends, fairy tales, jokes and riddles. We explore the effectiveness of lexical, structural, stylistic and domain specific features. We find that it is possible to obtain a good performance using only shallow features. As dataset for our experiments we used the Dutch Folktale database, containing narratives from the 16th century until now.

The paper will be presented at the KONVENS workshop on Language Technology for Historical Text(s) on 21 September 2012 in Vienna, Austria.

Also see the publications section.

In recent years, a new cultural sphere based on instant exchange of information has led to new kinds of communication, not merely for practical purposes but also for entertainment, social contact, the exchange of beliefs and opinions, and even the expression of emotions. Online life has become an integral part of people’s existence and therefore merits ethnological research.

This volume presents selected papers from a panel session on virtual lives held at the 10th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) titled People Make Places: Ways of Feeling the World, 17–21 April 2011, Lisbon, Portugal.

The authors investigate a range of topics: rules, rituals, morals and self-representations in the worlds of social media and gaming; how avatars are used for self-representation on dating sites; the rivalry between the inhabitants of Moscow and St. Petersburg as expressed on an Internet forum; websites for mourning over and remembering suicide victims in two countries; and the way the Internet can be used by new vernacular religious movements.

Lodz University Press, 2012
Softcover, 148 pages
Price €22.00
ISBN 978-83-7525-671-0

Abstract
The recurrence of characteristic motifs plays an important role in the identification of a folk song melody as member of a tune family. Based on a unique data set with expert annotations of motif occurrences in a collection of Dutch folk song melodies, we define 15 abstract motif classes. Taking a computational approach, we evaluate to what extent these 15 motif classes contribute to automatic identification of folk songs. We define various similarity measures for melodies represented as sequences of motif occurrences. In a retrieval experiment, alignment measures appear the most successful. The results are additionally improved by taking into account the phrase position of motif occurrences. These insights motivate future research to improve automatic motif detection and retrieval performance, and to determine similarity between melodies on the basis of motifs.

This paper will be presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, July 23-28, 2012 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Abstract
This paper deals with current research into melodic stability and variation in cadences as they occur in oral and semi-oral traditions. Creating a new framework for melodic transcription, we have quantized and compared cadences found in Torah trope, strophic melodies from the Dutch folk song collection Onder de groene linde and Qur’an recitation. Working within this new transcription framework, we have developed computational methods to analyze similarity and variation in melodic formulas in cadences as they occur in recorded examples of the before-mentioned oral/semi-oral traditions. We have investigated stability and variation using histogram–based scales, melodic contours, and melodic outlines for recorded examples and we interpret our findings with regard to mechanisms of the process of oral transmission in these oral/semi-oral traditions.

This paper will be presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, July 23-28, 2012 in Thessaloniki, Greece.