Maps, Networks, Ghosts and Witches: Experiments in Computational Folklore

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Speaker: Timothy Tangherlini, Professor, UCLA

Folklore, which can be defined as informal communication across social networks, has always highlighted the connection between culturally expressive forms and geography. Folklorists ask not only who tells what kind of story to whom, but also how storytelling influences our understanding of the local environment, and how storytelling influences decision making. Do certain types of stories cluster around certain geographic areas? Are these story clusters related to contemporaneous ideological or political debate? Can we discern an ideological bias in a folklorist's field collecting routes? Using a nineteenth century corpus of Danish folklore comprising a quarter of a million stories told by 6,500 named individuals to one individual over the course of fifty years, I explore how the application of various computational techniques, including historical GIS, machine learning and network analysis, to a large Humanities corpus can help reveal patterns in the data that in some cases contest and in some cases confirm existing orthodoxy. This approach is based in part on Franco Moretti's theoretically rich concept of "distant reading". At the end of the presentation, I explore some recent folkloric phenomena, including Twitter networks and the Iranian uprisings of 2009, the narrative response to Hurricane Katrina, and the propagation of stories on Facebook of the rogue trader who typed 1b instead of 1m leading to massive losses on Wall Street in 2010.