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- Convenors:
-
Terry Gunnell
(University of Iceland)
Kyrre Kverndokk (University of Bergen)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- NARRATIVE
- Location:
- Room H-206
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In addition to containing five or six lectures on individual projects, the plan is for these sessions (potentially two) to end with a 20 minute roundtable in which participants can discuss potential ways of working together and keeping these new digital archives both alive and accessible.
Long Abstract:
In the last two decades, just as the many archives (particularly those dealing with folkloristic materials) were on the edge of being consigned to the cellar or the rubbish tip, the process of digitalisation can be said to have reopened the doors to this material, not only making it more accessible to both scholars and the public, but also allowing the possibility to utilise a wide range of interconnections that offer new understandings of the material in question, and simultaneously raise important new questions. The aim of this session to to introduce a number of the recent digital projects relating to folklore and ethnology that have come into being in the Nordic countries over the last 20 years, noting the ways in which these projects have been developing, and underlining how they can potentially interconnect with each other.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Presenting the creation, content, and potential of a digital archive of letters, meeting minutes, drawings and other documents, relating to the Icelandic culture-creating Evening Society (1861–1874), its members, and—in particular—one of its co-founders, the artist Sigurður Guðmundsson (1833–1874).
Paper long abstract:
We will present a digital archive relating to the artist Sigurður (“Siggi”) Guðmundsson (1833-1874) and the “Evening Society” (Kvöldfélagið) that operated in Reykjavík from 1861 to 1874. The secretive society of young intellectuals was instrumental in the creation of culture in Iceland and its influence and efforts still resonate in Icelandic society today.
The digital archive was created as part of a seven-year-long wide-ranging research project into the activities of Sigurður and the Evening Society and contains hundreds of transcriptions, images of letters, documents, and meeting-minutes that shed light on the personal lives of those involved, along with the inner workings, history, and development of the Society itself.
We will describe the work that went into the archive´s creation, point to particularly significant elements, and show examples of findings the digitization of the archive afforded. Finally, we will outline and demonstrate the potential this re-activation archive presents for further work and international collaborations.
Paper short abstract:
Paper about the making of an integrated digital archive created by the re-organisation of materials in several folklore archives and databases of folktales.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will describe the combination of digital data originated from several archives and research projects. The Ísmús database was originally a web interface for the Árni Magnússon Institute's folklore audio archive and was later expanded to be also a database about musicology and the history of music in Iceland.
Work on the Sagnagrunnur database of Icelandic folk legends began in 1999, and in the space of three years came to include information about over 10,000 legends in print. Over the course of time, the database has continued to develop with extended material from the research project on the collection and publication process of Jón Árnason's Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (1862-1864). The main aim of this project was to carefully document the process that lay behind the first main collection of folk tales in Iceland. The focus of the project was on documenting all materials relating to the collection of Jón Árnason's work, involving the scanning and transcription of letters between Jón Árnason, his collectors, and his fellow editors. The data in Ísmús, in Sagnagrunnur, from the research project about Jón Árnason's collection and more material has now been joined in a new database giving researchers and the general public access to vast collection of folklore material spanning a period from the mid-nineteenth century till the present day.
Paper short abstract:
The FILTER project brings together Estonian and Finnish folklorists, computational scholars and two national corpora to explore the variation of historical oral tradition. The paper introduces the development of various interfaces, and the research planned and performed during the project.
Paper long abstract:
In the 19th–20th century Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Finland, alliterative tetrametric runosong tradition was collected in great amounts, archived and typologised. From the late 20th century on, the Estonian and Finnish collections have been digitized into two databases. Although there have always been tight connections and discussions among the runosong researchers, the research has mostly been divided into national research traditions, each one dealing with a separate, mostly language-specific material.
In the current collaborative FILTER project (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/filter-project/), we have brought together two voluminous data collections tp the corpus of c. 250 000 poetic texts. That enables us for the first time to access the runosong tradition as a coherent whole, to explore it in the large scale, to discover the minor details with the help of computational means and to focus on the genres and regions that have not received much attention earlier. Along the project span of four years we intend to search new ways to analyse the large corpus, intertwining methods of close and distant reading and taking into account the biases and problems of the data..
In the project, the idea is to develop new approaches according to the needs of the humanistic researchers and possiblities known by and invented with the computational scholars. We are not developing any single master tool, but rather creating a network of new and pre-existing tools that help to respond to various humanistic research questions. The paper introduces the various interfaces developed for runosong research and research results obtained thus far.
Paper short abstract:
A presentation of the journey of Finland´s Swedish-language folklore on to a online resource. How were the materials, collected by the Society of Swedish Literature (SLS), processed for online publication and what is the functionality of the digital resource folkdiktning.sls.fi?
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation I wish to describe the journey of materials related to Finland’s Swedish-language folklore from the field to the archive, and from a printed anthology to becoming an online resource. I will shortly explain why the Society of Swedish Literature (SLS), among others, began to collect information on Finland-Swedish traditions and customs, and how the materials came to be published, first in the comprehensive anthology entitled Finlands svenska folkdiktning and later in the online portal folkdiktning.sls.fi. How, concretely, were the collected materials processed for online publication, and what is the functionality of the digital version? How can the online resource be used to disseminate knowledge of folklore, as well as to increase the recognition of tradition-bearers and of those who went to great trouble in their time to collect the materials from the field? How can the resource be further improved to meet the needs of the users?
I will also present sls.finna.fi, SLS´s page on the national online platform finna.fi. Sls.finna.fi is the main platform SLS uses for publishing archive material online.
Keywords: folklore, oral tradition, Finland-Swedish, traditions, online resources, online platforms, digital publication, collection, archive
Paper short abstract:
In this paper the platform Folke is presented. Not only are Swedish folklore records made available for research on the platform, but the general public is also invited to help with making the archive collections accessible and - not least - with adding new information about older folklore records.
Paper long abstract:
The digital platform Folke, which was launched in January 2021, will not only change the work at the Institute of Languages and Folklore in Gothenburg but also the use of its folklore collections.
Hundreds of thousands of pages of folklore records have been made available on the platform, which has been developed as part of the research infrastructure The National Language Bank of Sweden. Parts of the platform are aimed for the general public, who will not only gain access to the collections but also are invited to help with making the archive collections more accessible and - not least - more complete. Another part of Folke is primarily aimed for the research community. Here new opportunities are being provided to search and analyze the folklore collections on Folke, among other things via maps and topic modeling.
In this paper, Folke, its possibilities and limitations (both for the archive and the users of the collections) are presented and discussed, and also our ambitions to develop the platform to become a digital folklore archive