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Accepted Poster

Digital Infrastructures for Folk Narrative Research: Mapping Northern European Resources  
Sanita Reinsone (University of Latvia) Kyrre Kverndokk (University of Bergen) Terry Gunnell (University of Iceland) Kati Kallio (Finnish Literature Society) Fredrik Skott (The Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden) Rosa Thorsteinsdottir (The Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies) Timothy Tangherlini (University of California, Berkeley) Will Lamb (University of Edinburgh)

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Paper long abstract

Large-scale digitisation of folklore collections has created a strong but still fragmented landscape of digital infrastructures for folk-narrative research. This poster surveys the current state of these resources in Northern Europe, where extensive digital platforms now provide access to vast bodies of narrative material, though coordination across them remains limited. We show how these infrastructures support comparative, multilingual, and cross-border studies, and why closer interoperability is a pressing priority.

We highlight major digital platforms, such as samla.no (Norway), dúchas.ie (Ireland), Folke (Sweden), garamantas.lv (Latvia), hiddenheritage.ai (Scottland/Ireland), sagnagrunnur.arnastofnun.is (Iceland), Kivike (Estonia), and the Danish Folklore Nexus. Related initiatives, such as the Dutch Legend Database and wossidia.de in Germany, illustrate how digital infrastructures of folklore archives expand the range of accessible materials and enable new opportunities for comparative and computational research. Building on such infrastructures, projects like ISEBEL (multilingual legend search) and FILTER (analysis of Finnic/Estonian song variation), together with recent NLP/ASR work on Scottish/Irish Gaelic storytelling corpora, demonstrate how digital tools can extend cross-collection analysis and comparative approaches in folk-narrative studies.

The poster provides a curated set of core digital platforms and tools, a comparative overview of their content, functions, and research workflows they support, and selected examples of how they open new perspectives on research of narrative traditions, including nature-culture entwined storytelling. The poster closes by indicating pathways toward merging national initiatives into more interoperable and sustainable infrastructures for folklore research.

5 more co-authors:

Line Esborg, line.esborg@ikos.uio.no

Tiber Falzett, tiber.falzett@ucd.ie

Angun Sønnesyn Olsen, angun.olsen@uib.no

Ida Tolgensbakk, ida.tolgensbakk@norskfolkemuseum.no

Mari Väina, mari@haldjas.folklore.ee

Poster PO1
ISFNR2026 Poster session
  Session 1