Paper short abstract:

At the beginning of the 20th century, international indexing and cross-referencing type-systems were developed for folklore archiving and research. The platform that I suggest could be for the digital age what those systems were for the earlier era.

Paper long abstract:

An international platform for digital corpora

At the beginning of the twentieth century, international indexing and cross-referencing type-systems were developed for folklore archiving and research that have now advanced to international standards. The platform that I suggest in my paper could be developed in a common project, and could be for the digital age what those systems were for the earlier era, informed by an intervening century of insights and understandings.

There is a need for a versatile www-infrastructure that would provide a platform for digital corpora of oral traditions with an ergonomic user-interface allowing searches within a particular tradition, and across the oral traditions of multiple cultures according to a diverse range of criteria. Based on repositories, distributed possibly in different countries, the idea of linked oral tradition could be put forward in a new way.

One relevant direction for future research would involve advancing the typological units from tradition-dependent to cross-cultural typologies. The potential of the digital corpora, the semantic web technologies and the methodology of textual analysis will enable the creation of a model for an international platform of oral tradition. This will be possible by using metadata schemes that are machine-readable and language independent. The new type of platform could be applicable for a fully multidisciplinary range of studies. The development and application of the common scheme could be undertaken in conjunction with comparative research on oral traditions in order to test and develop the scheme's relevance and applicability for diverse types of research priorities.