Volume 64, Issue 1-2

This case study contributes to recent attempts to apply “phylomemetic” methods derived from computational biology to oral traditions, where the aim is to trace the mutation and diversification of folk narratives as they get passed on from generation to generation and spread from society to society. Our study focuses on one of the most famous and widespread tales in the folktale record: Cinderella. Thousands of Cinderella-like stories have been documented from around the world, which folklorists have attempted to classify into different “types” representing distinct, though related, international traditions. The most comprehensive of Cinderella typologies was developed by Anna Birgitta Rooth (1951), who divided the tales into five principal types: A, B, AB, BI and C, and suggested several hypotheses pertaining to their origins and relationships to one another. Here, we test Rooth’s theories on a sample of 266 versions of Cinderella using Bayesian phylogenetic inference, phylogenetic networks (NeighborNet) and a model-based clustering method that was originally designed to elicit population structure from multi-locus genotype data (implemented in the program STRUCTURE). Our results find varying levels of support for the types identified by Rooth, and suggest that mixing among traditions was widespread, especially in Type AB tales. Despite these complexities, it was still possible to delineate and quantify the influence of distinct ancestral sources on the variation observed in contemporary versions of Cinderella. Our study highlights the value and versatility of phylomemetic methods in uncovering the historical relationships among types and sub-types of international folktale, as well as the evolutionary processes that have shaped them.

This study utilizes quantitative methods to investigate feminist claims about beauty in a series of ATU 510A Cinderella texts. Youth and beauty are found to be linked, and structurally, the protagonist’s encounter with the donor figure does not further beautify her but rather gives her the tools for social advancement. Articulating links between gender, beauty, and success matters in both tale worlds and the real world given not only the pressure of social norms but also the continued issue of gender-based violence due to masculine entitlement to beautiful women’s bodies.

A new trend has been swelling in the ocean of comparative mythology. Different research has been carried out using statistics to reconstruct the (pre)history of myths and mythological motifs (replicable episodes of traditional narratives) and to understand how they have evolved. The results obtained by using these different approaches converge and make it possible to intertwine numerous strands of evidence. We will try to summarize it in this paper, with special focus in the first part on the research on motifs, in the second part, on the research on different versions of a same myth. Folklore and mythology form an autonomous sphere of culture being largely independent from outer factors. The transition of folklore and mythology motifs between generations does not require material resources. Accordingly, they can be preserved during an indeterminately long period of time and this ability to be preserved can become a major asset in the study of the human past.

The ATU tale type index and the Motif Index of Folk-Literature have formed the basis for many comparative folktale studies. While the indices have been used extensively for the study of small groups of folktales and their associated motifs, there have been few attempts of describing a large linguistically and culturally unified corpus through its indexing. The study corpus consists of 2,606 folktales collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in nineteenth century Denmark, which were later indexed according to the second revised edition of the Aarne-Thompson index. We adjust this older index to align with the current ATU index. By creating linked network representations of the ATU index and the MI, as well as updating the Brandt indexing of the Danish folktales, we generate a network with 19,738 nodes and 28,292 edges, where nodes can be ATU numbers, MI numbers, Danish folktales, storytellers, or places of collection. By embedding all the Danish stories in this network, we provide a large-scale overview of the Danish folktale tradition. We introduce two novel interrelated network decomposition methods for the study of folktale collections at corpus scale: fixed points of degree peeling and graph fragments. The resulting analysis of the Danish corpus supports comparison with other traditions. Any collection that is similarly indexed can be embedded in this ATU+MI network and then subjected to the same interrelated graph decompositions.

Computational motif detection in folk narratives is an unresolved problem, partly because motifs are formally fluid, and because test collections to teach machine learning algorithms are not generally available or big enough to yield robust predictions for expert confirmation. As a result, standard tale typology based on texts as motif strings renders its computational reproduction an automatic classification exercise. In this brief communication, to report work in progress we use the Support Vector Machine algorithm on the ten best populated classes of the Annotated Folktales test collection, to predict text membership in their internationally accepted categories. The classification result was evaluated using recall, precision, and F 1 scores. The F 1 score was in the range 0.8–1.0 for all the selected tale types except for type 275 ( The Race between Two Animals ), which, although its recall rate was 1.0, suffered from a low precision.

ISEBEL is an online database for belief legends. The acronym stands for: Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends. The database contains more than 70,000 traditional legends in Dutch, Frisian, Danish and German, while another 6,000 Icelandic legends are currently being added. The initiative for this project was taken several years ago by the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, the University of Rostock/the Wossidlo Research Center and UCLA/UC Berkeley. The ambition is to create a European database, with an intelligent search function and geographical visualizations. What makes the search engine ‘intelligent’ is that it can always be searched in English, thanks to high-quality automatic translations in the background. The legend material that is brought together can also form the basis of sophisticated graphs that network themes, motifs, narrators, repertoires, and places. This article includes examples of international legends about mermaids and werewolves.

This article sheds light on the digital transformation of Richard Wossidlo’s regional ethnographic and linguistic collection into the research environment WossiDiA. The Digital Wossidlo Archive is based on making handwritten sources and their indexing visible to users. It has been implemented as a hypergraph database, whose abundance of node and hyperedge types is suitable for representing the diversity and delicate nature of the tradition archive. This paper will discuss how proprietary properties have been preserved in the transformation process and how the digital collection is compatible with big data scenarios. Follow-up projects have contributed to this. “Efficiency,” the necessity of resource-saving, will also be problematized. Finally, it will be shown how a sparse ethnographic fieldnote can be enriched into a complex hypergraph extract, a method which is reminiscent of dragnet detection.

The article presents a concise history of Polish folk tale from oral – analogue – beginnings to the digital collections of today. First, the storytelling tradition in Poland is described, secondly, an overview is given on folk tale collections and on the Polish research tradition, and, finally, the current digital folk tale archives are introduced in more detail. The focus of the article is about the recent development of online folk tale indexes and collections by popularising the very rich Polish folk tale documentation and scholarship as a valuable part of the European and global intangible heritage in the digital era.

The article presents the advantages of using databases for the organization of folklore materials found on the internet, such as folktale archives, motif databases and books. It explores examples of databases that already exist on the internet and contain folklore materials and examines the possibility of establishing an open system of folklore databases and other projects that enable the participation of folklorists from around the world.