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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, -Kyrre Kverndokk (University of Bergen) Hans-Jakob Ågotnes (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
The digitization project SAMLA will establish a Norwegian digital folklore archive. It will make sources from three archives accessible online. What is the status of the project and what are the possibilities and challenges in conducting a trans-institutional digitization project?
Paper long abstract:
Norwegian tradition archives have in recent years have suffered from funding cuts and other challenges. Many of the collections are hard to access and even harder to search. A newly funded Research Council of Norway project, SAMLA (2020-2024), aims to reverse this, by establishing a national digital archive based on the collections of three mayor tradition archives in Norway. These archives hold records of a diversity of cultural expressions and practices of both majority, minority and indigenous cultures, in the form of folktales, ballads, beliefs, food and craft traditions, life stories as well as descriptions of children's games.
SAMLA aims to establish an online archive that will make this rich source material accessible for research, education and businesses. The project will establish a digital database that allows advanced searches across archive institutions and types of material. In that way, the project will enable in-depth analyses of specific practices, narratives and beliefs. The project also aims to coordinate this national archive with corresponding digital infrastructures in Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe in order to facilitate for macroscopic understandings of the folklore material as large-scale cultural patterns.
This presentation will present the objectives and status of the project and also discuss some of the challenges in designing and conducting a trans-institutional digitization project.
Timothy Tangherlini (University of California, Berkeley)
Paper short abstract:
We offer an overview of the ISEBEL project and some of the challenges faced while developing a multilingual search engine for tradition archives representing diverse languages and cultures. We propose a series of analytic tools that could support a data-driven analysis of these expressive forms.
Paper long abstract:
In an EU-NEH project, researchers from the Netherlands (Meertens), Germany (Wossidlo), and Denmark (University of California), created ISEBEL (Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends), a "search once, retrieve from multiple archives" search engine designed specifically for tradition archives. Initial challenges included the complexities of archival restrictions, disparate classification regimes, and diverse languages. ISEBEL uses the OAI-PMH model for meta-data harvesting and a customizable open-source management portal, CKAN, that incorporates a relational database, Solr indexing, and map-based display and navigation. Downstream challenges included the development of (i) a common, minimal schema allowing local archives to control their data, (ii) an extensible open vocabulary for tradition specific terms, and (iii) neural machine translation models to support multilingual search. The SAMLA project in Norway explores many of these problems at a greater scale and with more heterogeneous data. SAMLA also presents the tantalizing challenge of working with dialect and the closely related Nordic languages. As such, it offers a unique opportunity for Nordic tradition archives to expand on some of the developments of ISEBEL, and national projects such as Sagnagrunnur (Iceland) and Folke (Sweden). Yet, there is a pressing need to develop data-driven analytics providing more sophisticated visualizations such as correlations between local regions and topics and the use of context-aware word embedding models for discovery of communities. Incorporating sophisticated multiplex representations of the tradition space would make available a series of graph-theoretic methods that may unlock unexpected insight into the tradition space.
Charlotte Hylten-Cavallius (Institute for Language and Folklore) Jenny Öqvist (Institute for Language and Folklore) Susanne Nylund Skog (Institute for Language and Folklore)
Paper short abstract:
We present and discuss our work with the digital platform "In motion". It aims to make visible archived narratives about migration to, from and within Sweden. We emphasize the importance of curating the narratives to make the archival materials truly accessible to both scholars and the public.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we present and discuss our work with the digital platform "In motion" ('I rörelse'). In motion aims to make visible archived narratives about migration to, from and within Sweden over the past 100 years. The platform is based on the historical collections of the Institute for Language and Folklore and makes use of an interactive world map to show individual's movements in space and time. Our goal has been to create a versatile digital resource with a scientific and knowledge-spreading approach to the migration issues of today. The platform's target groups are both the research community and the broader public, including children and young people.
In this paper, we describe our work with In motion by highlighting a few examples of the narratives included in the platform. We emphasize the importance of curating the narratives and discuss why it has never been a possibility for us to simply make the archive material digitally available, without contextualizing information. With the platform, we strive to be a stable voice in today's heated debates on migration by contributing with personal experiences from the archives.
Niina Hämäläinen (Kalevala Society)
Paper short abstract:
In my paper, I will reflect on emotions and digitalized archive materials by asking if digitalization could increase our understanding of emotions appearing in archive material or if it is just one of the means for better preserving the material and controlling the past.
Paper long abstract:
As a meaning of folklore is dependent on the world outside it (e.g. performance, social usage, local community), so emotions are shaped and created by their surroundings. Referring to Sara Ahmed (2004) and her notion of emotions as embodied and activated by different surfaces, I focus on emotions through digitalized archive material. What kind of advantages digitalization can offer for understanding and achieving emotions? The problem with emotions of the archive material is their inaccessibility. How to capture emotions when it is not possible to experience the moment of actual performance, and further, whose emotions, in fact, are perceived in documented texts, and to what extent it is about a researcher’s own emotions? The archive material in question consists of digitalized projects of the 19th century oral-literary sources: Elias Lönnrot’s letters, critical edition of the Kalevala, and database of Finnish-Karelian oral poetry. While these digital sources allow open access to every user and create new understanding on massive manuscript materials, digitalization could also guide us methodologically and make archive sources “louder”, more visible – and in some cases –achievable in terms of emotions. By giving a few examples, I will show some contextual and intertextual links between different digital platforms that might disentangle and re-open emotional aspects embedded the sources.
Tina Paphitis (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
Facilitated by archival digitalisation projects, this paper explores extant and potential relationships between digital folklore and the folklore archive as a way of increasing broader participation with archives and reconnecting their materials to wider contemporary global challenges.
Paper long abstract:
Digital folklore – digitally (re)produced and mediated vernacular culture – is a form of active, ongoing and self-including heritage production that can give us insights into what is socially, culturally and politically significant to a diverse public. Ranging from, for example, memes and hashtags to email chains and creepypasta, digital folklore reflects contemporary creative expression and, in some instances, activism. Alongside the interactionist nature of digital folklore, digitalisation of folklore archives heightens their accessibility and has the potential to broaden engagement with folklore materials. This, in turn, gives us greater opportunities to reconnect ‘old’ or analogue folklore of the archive with new, digital folklore practiced online. This paper considers how digital folklore can be utilised as a participatory tool to diversify engagement with folklore archives, and to reconnect and reactivate archival material in relation to broader global challenges and debates. Focusing on Norway and the broader Nordic region, it will consider how digital folklore can reflect a more diverse public in contemporary society which can be excluded from heritage narratives or disenfranchised from heritage institutions such as folklore archives. Drawing on examples of new and ongoing folklore (re)production online, and taking advantage of the digitalisation of archival materials, it will draw out and explore varied relationships and themes between digital and archival folklore to broaden heritage narratives and engagement with the archive. This thus both emphasises the significance of digital folklore and its reconnection to materials in the archive, and illustrates new, active ways to use and sustain digitalisation of such archives.