Article Archives - Folklore Fellows

Historical Oral Poems and Digital Humanities

Petja Kauppi — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 12:53:26 +0000

In this essay, we describe early experiments in a computational folkloristics project FILTER aimed at studying formulaic intertextuality, thematic networks and poetic variation across regional cultures of Finnic oral poetry.

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Covid Conspiracies

Petja Kauppi — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 12:37:02 +0000

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an explosion of storytelling—much of it framed as believable first-person accounts—across many media. A large number of these stories reflect aspects of both rumor (which can be seen as a hyperactive transmission state of legend) and of conspiracy theory (Rosnow and Fine 1976; Tangherlini 1990; Fine et al. 2005). If we conceptualize folklore at least in part as the informal circulation of cultural expressive forms on and across social networks, thereby incorporating both the performance aspects of folklore and its dependence on social interactions embedded both in time and space, it should be of little surprise that the current situation has engendered a great deal of storytelling.

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Beyond Content Analysis – Narratives of Belonging in a Changing Neighborhood

Folklore Fellows — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 12:18:14 +0000

Katherine Borland Recently, I have been exploring the significance of contradictory statements in oral personal narratives and what they might tell us about social identities on the one hand and about the limitations of our research methods on the other. Although much of the early literature on life review focuses on the importance of […]

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A Brief History of the University of California, Berkeley’s Folklore Graduate Program

Folklore Fellows — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 09:23:36 +0000

Charles L. Briggs Please join me on a whirlwind tour of the University of California’s Folklore Graduate Program. In 1957 William Bascom came to the Department of Anthropology. A specialist on African art, Bascom served as president of the American Folklore Society in 1953–1954. Trained at Indiana University in anthropology, folklore, and linguistics, Dell […]

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The Where, How and Who of Digital Ethnography

Folklore Fellows — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 09:01:32 +0000

Coppelie Cocq “I found it on the internet.” I am convinced that I am not the only one who has received this answer when asking a student to specify the origin of her/his material. “The internet” is part of everyday life for most of us, to some extent and in some form – in our […]

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