Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation analyzes the gender and age distribution of performers and collectors in the Estonian oral song corpus. We compare data across collection periods and regions, examining gender and age relationships, and interpret the results in folkloristic and historical contexts.

Paper Abstract:

The southern tradition of Finnic oral runosong can be characterized as female-centered, based on song content and dominant performance forms, though a distinct male tradition also existed. During the modernization era, women retained the old singing style longer, while men transitioned more quickly to newer forms. In the early phase of active collecting in the late 19th century, the creators of the archive representations—local correspondents and (semi)professional urban intellectuals—were predominantly men. By the 20th century, female collectors gained a significant presence.

This presentation analyzes the gender and age distribution and dynamics of the performers and collectors in the Estonian runosong corpus, asking also how gender- and age-based relationships may have shaped the collection process. Using digital tools, we determine the gender and harmonized ages of performers and collectors. This is followed by examining gender and age dynamics across different collecting periods and exploring whether differences emerge between local and non-local collectors. Correlating performer and collector data allows us to ask whether a collectors’ gender influenced their preference for performers of a particular gender during fieldwork. We also analyze regional variation in the gender and age distribution of performers across Estonia.

The data is interpreted within the historical and regional context of the singing tradition, the history of song collecting, and the broader framework of local socio-cultural history.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities in digitizing the manuscript legacy of 20th-century folklore collector Árpád Együd (1921–1983). Együd, a 20th-century folklore collector, documented folk music, dance, ballads, fairy tales, legends, and village life histories, primarily in Somogy County (Hungary). His legacy, housed in the Kaposvár museum, includes handwritten manuscripts, photographs, films, and audio recordings. The study concentrates on Együd’s typewritten manuscript archive, demonstrating the digitization workflow and concept: OCR, metadata standardization, and semantic enrichment. Special attention is given to encoding textual variations in folklore using TEI XML. The research identifies which phases of the digitization process can be automated and how this enhances efficiency. By developing a systematic digital methodology, this study offers solutions for creating accessible, annotated, and data-enriched editions of folklore texts.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities in digitizing the manuscript legacy of 20th-century folklore collector Árpád Együd (1921–1983). Együd conducted extensive folklore collections from the late 1950s, primarily in Somogy County but also in neighboring regions, Perőcsény (Pest County), and Transylvania. His work spans folk music, dance, ballads, fairy tales, legends, and village life histories, resulting in an extensive archive of manuscripts, audio recordings, photographs, and films housed in the museum of Kaposvár.

While previous archival efforts have digitized parts of his collection across four platforms, this study concentrates on his typewritten manuscript archive. The digitization process is demonstrated step-by-step, beginning with scanning, applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR), metadata standardization, and semantic enrichment using identifiers such as VIAF, WikiData, Hungarian National Name Database (Nemzeti Névtér). Special attention is given to encoding textual variations in folklore using TEI XML.

The study highlights the phases of digitization that can be automated and discusses the methods used to optimize efficiency. Through this approach, the paper offers solutions for creating annotated, data-enriched digital editions of folklore texts, ensuring accessibility and long-term preservation.

Paper Short Abstract:

The game of Tig, and its counting out rhymes, showcase the Irish Schools’ Collection and the value of a fully transcribed archival collection. Using text-mining and NLP to map and compare rhymes offers new understanding of counting out, bringing it from archival text toward performance and play.

Paper Abstract:

The chasing game variously known as “Tig,” “Tag,” or “Tib” by English speakers is one of the simplest and most widespread children’s games. In 1937, when the student collectors of the Irish National Folklore Commission’s Schools’ Collection were charged with documenting various folklore categories, including “Games I Play,” they produced over a thousand descriptions of Tig. While the game itself is simple, unpacking its play reveals a complex linking of physical, linguistic, and intellectual components, including the oft-studied counting-out rhyme. Thanks to the team at the NFC, duchas.ie, and the crowd-source work of Meitheal Duchas, the collection has been fully digitally transcribed. Now, computational methods from natural language and text processing can be applied to the rhymes, allowing for categorization and comparison. Utilizing and adapting state-of-the-art methods, such as phonetic embeddings, shifts the object of study from the text itself back towards structure, sound, and playground performance. Comparing the many different rhymes reveals geographic distribution, gendered patterns of play, and the ways children collect and utilize a repertoire of rhymes. The computational visualizations provide a broad view of patterns, without either abstracting the performances, or choosing a select few to stand as representative examples. This study furthers the act of un-writing by reimagining the corpus as a landscape of tradition, shaped by geography and structural similarity, rather than presenting only the linear text. Finally, the work highlights the sometimes-overlooked genre of children’s games, by focusing on the oral formulas and poetics of play.

Paper Short Abstract:

This research applies Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and machine learning methods to automatically cluster instrumental folk music recordings based on their melodic and harmonic content. In addition to identifying different performances of the same musical piece, this approach also facilitates the detection of errors within digital archives, such as misattributed recordings or duplicate entries.

Paper Abstract:

Ethnomusicological analysis of folk music traditionally relies on the comparison of transcriptions derived from audio recordings, rather than analyzing the audio itself. This approach necessitates the manual transcription of recordings, a process that is both time-intensive and impractical for large datasets. The Estonian Folklore Archive houses an extensive repository of instrumental folk recordings, many of which have their potential interconnections yet to be uncovered. Additionally, there is a growing need to identify inconsistencies within digital archives, such as misattributed recordings or duplicates.

The task of identifying different performances of the same musical piece—commonly referred to as cover song identification in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR)—has seldom extended beyond manual approaches in ethnomusicology. MIR combines musicology, computer science, and signal processing to extract musically relevant information directly from audio signals. Despite its widespread use in popular music (e.g., for classification or recommendation systems), its applicability to archival recordings remains largely unexplored.

In my Master’s thesis, I leveraged MIR and machine learning to automatically cluster instrumental folk music recordings based on their melodic and harmonic content, addressing the challenge of identifying “covers”—i.e., different performances of the same piece—and detecting anomalies within the archives. This presentation discusses the findings of this research and hopes to demonstrate the potential of MIR methods to uncover patterns and relationships not immediately discernible through traditional manual methods. While not intended to replace manual analysis, computational approaches offer a valuable complementary tool in ethnomusicological studies to enhance the efficiency of analyzing, comparing, and classifying audio recordings.

Paper Short Abstract:

Written and audio documents are the two main sources for studying the history of folk music. What are the possible uses of modern technologies to combine these two kinds of documents? Can they provide us with new insights into old questions about folk music?

Paper Abstract:

Archives of folk music consist, on the one hand of collections of written and printed sources, and on the other of audio recordings preserved on various media from wax cylinders to modern digital formats. Each of these two groups provides users with different information, leading to varying understandings of folk music and how it can be studied.

The archive of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences contains written documents that go back to the beginning of the 19th century and audio recordings as old as 1909. In some cases, these documents were created during coordinated research projects, in other cases by individual collectors. During the last decades, they have been gradually digitized to preserve them and make them available.

Modern information technologies make it possible to create all kinds of connections between documents. The issue, however, is to critically assess what information can be extracted from these sources and what meaningful connections can be made between them.

The presentation will try to outline new directions currently being sought at our archive and how modern methods of data analysis applied to both written and audio documents can help us find new perspectives on issues such as authenticity, performance style, or the relation between music and lyrics.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper notes the need to re-write the theoretical and methodological framework that Greek folklorists follow to study legends that refer to the community’s relatively recent past and proposes a novel approach using large digital corpora.

Paper Abstract:

In the context of a research on legends concerning the Greek War of Independence (1821), we turned to the digital repository that contains the Archive of Popular Legends of the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (HFRC) of the Academy of Athens, to search for the relevant legends. The results, however, were meager and did not include several traditions that we knew from our research experience to exist in the rich material kept in the HCFR Archive. This deficiency arises from the fact that the classification scheme that had been applied since the beginning of the 20th century for the organization of the Archive of Popular Legends followed the guidelines of N. Politis –the founder of the discipline of Folklore in Greece– and his successors, which did not include modern history. The need therefore arose to re-approach the theoretical and methodological framework that Greek folklorists follow for the study of legends that refer to the relatively recent past.

Therefore, for the needs of our research, we proceeded to excerpt all the material in the HFRC Archive concerning the Peloponnese, a region that was at the epicenter of revolutionary action throughout the War, while simultaneously combining these legends with relevant material that various organizations and individuals publish on the internet and social media. These new records not only enriched the existing digital repository of Popular Legends, but also constitute a novel approach to legends that refer to the community’s relatively recent past.

Paper Short Abstract:

With a rapid development of digital archives of various memory institutions in Lithuania, researchers are exposed to large amounts of various data that could be used for interdisciplinary studies. This presentation examines folk medicine's interplay with 1890s–1940s printed medical advice in Lithuania, highlighting cultural knowledge transmission, standardization, and coexistence of folk and official health paradigms.

Paper Abstract:

For the past 20 years, the Lithuanian Folklore Archives (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore) is creating the Digital Archive. With similar processes happening in other memory institutions, the researchers are offered new opportunities to examine the relationship between folklore collections and other media that existed during the corresponding time period when the personal or collective folklore fieldwork was being carried out. Digital-humanities methods, e.g. large-scale comparative analyses of textual and oral traditions, as well as machine learning algorithms could be employed as means to identify thematic overlaps in the near future. Analysis of relationship between recorded tradition and printed sources could reveal patterns of adaptation as well as resistance, highlighting the persistence of folk practices alongside the society that started pursuing deeper knowledge of its surroundings.

In this presentation I will explore the interplay between folk medicine and printed medical advice in 1890s to 1940s Lithuania, emphasizing the value of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding this relationship. Folk healing practices, often transmitted orally within communities, were frequently at odds with, yet influenced by, the rising industry of printed health manuals, instructions on disease prevention, and various periodicals. These printed texts sought to commodify health practices while often reflecting (and reshaping) local knowledge systems. My aim is to address questions, such as the cultural transmission of medical knowledge, the attempts of standardization of health practices, and the ways of coexistence of folk and official medical paradigms, hoping to provide useful insights for the further research of folk medicine and medical history.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how archival digitization, through Rhetorical Genre Studies, challenges traditional metadata frameworks, democratizes access, and reinvents archives as dynamic platforms. Using the Grundtvig Archive, it reveals how digitization disrupts authority, enabling new interpretations and inquiries.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the transformative potential of archival digitization through the lens of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), arguing that digitized archives disrupt fixed discursive communities and challenge the interpretive authority traditionally embedded in archival organization. Conventional archives, shaped by historical catalogues and metadata, impose pre-existing discursive frameworks on users. By re-imagining metadata as “finding aids,” the archive's function in the digital age can be re-framed, offering opportunities to challenge inherited narratives and open new interpretive pathways (1).

Central to this study is the digitization of the Grundtvig Archive. At his death on September 2, 1872, Danish nation-builder N.F.S. Grundtvig left an unparalleled collection: app. 45,000 manuscript leaves (90,000 pages) spanning 1798–1872. As Denmark’s largest private archive, it remains a cornerstone for Danish scholarship, frequently invoked to contextualize contemporary societal values within Grundtvig’s legacy.

Digitization does more than preserve the archive – it reinvents it. By democratizing access and providing dynamic entry points, the digitized archive challenges traditional notions of authority, interpretation, and historical motivation. The Grundtvig Archive becomes more than a static repository; it transforms into a living platform that unsettles entrenched narratives and empowers fresh inquiries.

(1) Heather MacNeil, 2012, “What finding aids do: archival description as rhetorical genre in traditional and web-based environments” in Archival Science, vol. 12, pp. 485-500. Rasmussen, K.S.G., Tafdrup, J., Ravn, K.S., & Baunvig, K.F., 2022, “The Case for Scholarly Editions” in Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, pp. 401-405. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 3232.

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation frames digital archival transcription programs as spaces of interaction, and archival transcription as an authorial process. Digital volunteers’ editorial liberties challenge archival functionality, but they also provide opportunities for analytical and ethnographic insights.

Paper Abstract:

During the past twenty years – and spurred by dynamics emerging in the increasingly-digital post-pandemic world – crowdsourced transcription has allowed archives to better digitize and make accessible their materials while fostering greater public engagement (Van Hyning and Jones 2021). The online interfaces mediating these transcription projects warp participant roles for researchers, volunteers, and readers and, in doing so, both reflect and renegotiate stance between actors (Goffman 1979; Gershon 2010). Using a sociolinguistic frame of analysis, we can understand digital archives as spaces of interaction, albeit indirect, across space and time. In this paper, I survey a range of participatory digital cultural heritage archival projects and the ways that different actors—volunteers, archivists, and funding agencies—position themselves, or are positioned, interactionally within the archives’ digital systems. Through this lens, I argue for an understanding of archival transcription as authorship. The creative, curatorial, and editorial liberties taken by project volunteers may pose immediate challenges for practical archival work, but they also provide opportunities for analytical and ethnographic insights (Benoit III and Everleigh 2019). More simply, volunteers’ creative impulses are proof that archival participation works—that it generates the diverse perspectives and community engagement that are at its core.

Paper Short Abstract:

How can digital folk archives be used to study the overlaps between modern folktales and their antecedents in Classical literature? Could an increased availability of regional archival data allow a new approach to the challenges of tracing the historical-geographical evolution of ancient narratives?

Paper Abstract:

In the 19th century, folklorists discovered that some internationally disseminated oral folktales closely resembled well-known narratives from Ancient Greek and Latin literature (such as Polyphemus, Cupid and Psyche, Oedipus and others), sparking an ongoing debate about whether folkloric variants and their Classical antecedents are genetically related. The ATU classification system provided a typological framework for identifying such overlaps. In the early 2000s, Graham Anderson and William Hansen used this classification to systematically detect correspondences between international folktales and Classical texts, identifying hundreds of parallels. Such typological comparisons between folktales and classical narratives, while not always genealogically linked, can shed light on both systems, and contribute to a better understanding of the historical-geographical evolution of some of the most famous and enduring narratives of the Western world.

However, there is still a lack of studies that verify the actual circulation of the ATU types studied by Anderson and Hansen in relation to the Classical literature in the areas once colonised by Greco-Latin civilisation and assess the extent to which their local variations in these areas affect textual comparisons with ancient literary texts.

This paper explores the benefits that the creation of a digital archive of modern folktales with ancient counterparts would bring to the study of the unwritten links between classical and folkloric narratives. It argues that greater access to data from Mediterranean areas, whose folkloric heritage remains little impacted by digitisation, could facilitate new approaches to tracing the diachronic development of longstanding Western narratives, potentially revolutionising folklore and literary studies.

Paper Short Abstract:

The Lithuanian Old Believers collection has examples of digitized household records that encompass diverse topics of the everyday life of Old Believers during the 2000s. This ego documentary material allows to research the community traditions through the lenses of their own members.

Paper Abstract:

Until this point, all studies pertaining to Old Believer folklore in Lithuania have been conducted through the lens of traditional ethnographic fieldwork. This approach involves observing and recording material during fieldwork, which is then analyzed and published in anthologies of Old Believers folklore. In Lithuania, there are numerous monographs dedicated to Old Believer folklore, as well as various non-academic releases of songbooks and CD records. However, certain material that has been stored for over a decade and has only recently been digitized and archived in the Folklore Archive of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore affords an alternative perspective on the Lithuanian Old Believers community research. It is the collection of Ivan Maloglazov, an Old Believer himself, who from 1998 until 2009 recorded Lithuanian Old Believers folklore and religious traditions, as well as his daily life. We can consider this to be a sort of ego documentary material, enabling us to research the Old Believers community traditions through the lenses of their own members. With these detailed recordings, it is possible to gain a more in-depth understanding of the Lithuanian Old Believers community customs in the 2000s. Is this digitized material going to provide a different picture regarding this community’s traditions, or will it only confirm what was already known? This question will remain unanswered until research is done. Currently, the author will present collection statistics and examples of digitized household records that encompass diverse topics of the everyday life of the Lithuanian Old Believers family during the 2000s.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the digitisation of Ukrainian folk song collections, focusing on a digital corpus of the Podillia region and Ukrainian dumas created during the project “Traditional Estonian and Ukrainian Folksongs: Comparative Corpus-Based Computational Analysis.” It explores the collections of Yavdokha Zuikha (compiled by Hnat Tantsiura), Nastia Prysiazhniuk, and two editions of dumas by Kateryna Hrushevska. The study highlights the networks of collectors and performers, the influence of compilers on published texts, and the challenges of preserving these materials under political and historical constraints.

Paper Abstract:

The digitisation of folklore collections offers unparalleled opportunities to explore the provenance, composition, and influence of cultural materials. This paper focuses on a digital corpus of the Podillia region and extending it with Ukrainian folk dumas. The corpus was created as part of the project “Traditional Estonian and Ukrainian Folksongs: Comparative Corpus-Based Computational Analysis.” It specifically examines the folk song collections of Yavdokha Zuikha, collected by Hnat Tantsiura (Dei 1965); Nastia Prysiazhniuk (Myshanych 1976); and two editions of Ukrainian dumas by Kateryna Hrushevska (1927; 1931).

Through an investigation of these sources, the paper investigates the networks of collectors and performers, the circulation and variation of song texts, and the impact of compilers on the final published versions. Special attention is given to the contributions of Kateryna Hrushevska, whose vision for a comprehensive six-volume edition of Ukrainian dumas resulted in the publication of only two volumes due to political and historical challenges. The second volume, published in the 1930s, faced near-total destruction, and by the 1950s and 1960s, was considered almost entirely lost to scholarly work (Polonska-Vasylenko 1962: 77). This study examines the historical conditions surrounding these publications and their subsequent preservation challenges.

The paper also explores the collectors’ approach to collecting, organising, and analysing folk songs, highlighting how her editorial decisions, orthographic norms, and analytical framework influenced the written representation of oral traditions. It considers the broader implications of these editorial practices for understanding the authenticity and transmission of Ukrainian folklore.

Paper Short Abstract:

Digital tools have a great potential in helping us to better understand our archival collections and the historical cultures—both elite and vernacular—that produced these. This paper concentrates on how a set of similarity recognition methods can be used both in analysing historical oral poetry and in estimating the characteristics of archival collections.

Paper Abstract:

Variation is a core characteristic of folklore: in oral tradition it is typical that the information is changing, due to various reasons such as creativity, adaptation, misunderstanding, and forgetting. This results in various degrees of similarity between the performances and records of folklore. In order to explore the patterns of variation in the vast material of Finnic oral poetry, Maciej Janicki along with the rest of the FILTER group configured a set of methods enabling us to recognize similar verses, passages and poems and measure their similarity.

Similarity assessment methods have enabled us to get better overview of the patterns of variation in oral tradition, for example, 1) recurrent units (or basic building blocks) at the line and passage level and the use of these in oral composition; 2) degrees of similarity of song texts and various reasons affecting these 3) oral-literary relationships and processes of modernisation; 4) variation of versions of poem types in multilingual and multidialectal continua; and 5) regional verse and song repertoires and their interconnections.

Besides explorations of the tradition itself, similarity calculations are useful in analysing overall characteristics and biases of archival collections. Very similar texts can often be explained by different versions by one singer, family or village tradition, or very popular and stable short poems, but many cases also derive from singers adapting songs or motifs from literary sources, basic education or school song books, collectors copying texts from each other or literary sources, and curating and editing processes causing duplicates.