Paper short abstract:

Paper is related to the project "Digital Catalogue of Latvian Charms", which aims to carry out a new fundamental research on Latvian charms by developing of advanced virtual tools and adaptation of digital humanities principles.

Paper long abstract:

The first dwelling of charms is among users and within performance, the second - into manuscripts and records of archives. The Archive of Latvian Folklore is main institution on research and storage of Latvian charms - more than 56,000 units of Latvian charms and their variations. It is one of the largest charm corpora among European and Scandinavian folklore archives. Most of the texts were collected and sent to the Archive during the 1930s in collaboration with schools and students from all over Latvia. In the interwar period of 20th century research on Latvian charm by Kārlis Straubergs was developed. After II WW situation in Latvia in the field of research on charm tradition was changed extremely - it came to a stand due to the political condition and impact of Soviet System on Latvian folkloristics. Only in the late 1980s scientific investigations on Latvian charm tradition renewed.

The third dwelling of charms is related to the project "Digital Catalogue of Latvian Charms", which aims to carry out a new fundamental research on Latvian charms by developing of advanced virtual tools and adaptation of digital humanities principles. Project intends to provide multilingual metadata interface, parallel Latvian text corpus of invariants in English, and new catalogue of Latvian charms according to European charm types will be elaborated. Thus Latvian charm corpus become useful for digital ethnography research and reach a new level of comparative charm studies in international context.