Timothy R. Tangherlini

Computational folkloristics

A searchable meta-graph can connect even troublesome house elves and other supernatural beings to scholarly folk categories.

Ships, Fogs, and Traveling Pairs: Plague Legend Migration in Scandinavia

This article examines the various forms the plague assumes in the legend traditions of Scandinavia. Eight new legend types are proposed in an effort to expand the existing type-index to more adequately describe the legend corpus. Common to all traditions are legends concerning the aftermath of the plague. The legends of Norway and Sweden often present the plague as a wandering woman or as a pair of children with a rake and broom. These legends are nonexistent in the Danish corpus. Instead, the Danish legends often present the plague as a celestial phenomenon, primarily fog or mist. The forms the legends take are possibly linked to the areas of diseaseprovenance. The legend migration may have followed the migration of the disease.

A multiscale theory for the dynamical evolution of sentiment in novels

Recent work in literary sentiment analysis has suggested that shifts in emotional valence may serve as a reliable proxy for plot movement in novels. The raw sentiment time series of a novel can now be extracted using a variety of different methods, and after extraction, filtering is commonly used to smooth the irregular sentiment time series. Using an adaptive filter, which is among the most effective in determining trends of a signal, reducing noise, and performing fractal and multifractal analysis, we show that the energy of the smoothed sentiment signals decays with the smoothing parameter as a power-law, characterized by a Hurst parameter H of 1/2 <; H <; 1, which signifies long-range correlations. We further show that a smoothed sentiment arc corresponds to the sentiment of fast playing mode or sentiment retained in ones memory, and that for a novel to be both captivating and rich, H has to be larger than 1/2 but cannot be too close to 1.

The Tell-Tale Hat: Surfacing the Uncertainty in Folklore Classification

Classification is a vexing problem in folkloristics. Although broad genre classifications such as “ballad”, “folktale”, “legend”, “proverb”, and “riddle” are well established and widely accepted, these formal classifications are coarse and dolittle more than provide a first level sort on materials for collections that can easily include tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of records.

A Resistant Strain: Revealing the Online Grassroots Rise of the Antivaccination Movement

An analysis of more than eight years of data from vaccination forums on mothering.com shows that the antivaccination movement is well-organized and widely dispersed, and that it emerged long before concerns about immunity were expressed. The findings are evidence of a formidable challenge to the social norms surrounding vaccination.

Semi-Supervised Morphosyntactic Classification of Old Icelandic

We present IceMorph, a semi-supervised morphosyntactic analyzer of Old Icelandic. In addition to machine-read corpora and dictionaries, it applies a small set of declension prototypes to map corpus words to dictionary entries. A web-based GUI allows expert users to modify and augment data through an online process. A machine learning module incorporates prototype data, edit-distance metrics, and expert feedback to continuously update part-of-speech and morphosyntactic classification. An advantage of the analyzer is its ability to achieve competitive classification accuracy with minimum training data.

Report of the President of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study

Over the past year, the Scandinavian countries have emerged as a touchstone in political debates, highlighting the fact that the need for education about the nordic region has never been more important. Many of our members have been asked to comment on Scandinavian topics in the media, and they have acted as important sources of competent, informed analysis tempered by nuanced and sophisticated understanding of nordic history, culture, and politics. through this public work, our members have brought attention to our field and have underscored the importance of our organization both nationally and internationally. Our visibility as a Society goes hand in hand with the importance of our research and teaching. the Society’s journal, Scandinavian Studies, under the leadership of editor Susan Brantly, continues to be a highly visible forum for cuttingedge research on issues related to the study of Scandinavia and the nordic region. there is no better indicator of this importance—and the relevance of our work—than the Society’s annual meeting. the 2017 meeting, held under the thematic banner of “nordic connections Old and new,” took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to one of the nation’s oldest programs in Scandinavian Studies at the university of Minnesota, and a city historically at the center of Scandinavian emigration. close collaboration between St. Olaf college and the university of Minnesota, with financial support from norden: the nordic council of Ministers and the american

GhostScope: Conceptual Mapping of Supernatural Phenomena in a Large Folklore Corpus

Since the inception of the field of folkloristics in the early nineteenth century, scholars have paid considerable attention to the relationship between place and folklore. An important yet largely overlooked question is how individuals in a tradition group, through their storytelling, negotiate the conceptualization of their local environment. In our work, we present a preliminary method for representing the conceptual mapping of the environment by storytellers or classes of storytellers. As opposed to our other geographically based methods for exploring the corpus, in which places are anchored in geography, GhostScope imagines all of the storytellers positioned at a conceptual “center.” Geographic locations are then calculated for direction and distance based on this zero-point. The work is based on a digitized subset of legends from Evald Tang Kristensen’s larger collection of Danish folklore.

Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark

variety), and Ogden includes details of a lesser-known conflict with a ketos (sea monster) from whom he rescues the princess Hesione. The well-known hero Perseus slays a sea monster to rescue Andromeda, and there is a substantial section, with translations of hard-to-access texts, about the apostle Philip who, after killing several serpents, drives out the viper-like Echidna and her priests, and introduces Christianity. Part One, containing nineteen chapters, focuses on classical dragon myths, such as Typhon and Python slain by deities such as Zeus and Apollo, and semi-historical dragon accounts such as the dragon of Bagrada killed by Regulus and his army. Ogden’s folklore-friendly approach, which puts the emphasis on the action, allows him to extend this account of dragon lore in interesting ways. The classical section includes a number of monsters like Cerberus, Lamia, Scylla, and the Chimera, whose behaviour and interaction with their opponents warrant their inclusion even though they are not immediately dragon-like. Part Two focuses its six chapters on dragons opposed by a variety of Christian saints. The opening chapter of this section gives an overview of dragons from the Bible and the apocrypha (187–95), while the other chapters cover saints such as Silvester, Patrick, Samson, and George. In addition, there are three appendices that extend the discussion beyond the defined scope of this book, and provide the reader with a number of fascinating topics and possibilities for further consideration. Appendix A presents ‘World-Foundational Dragon-Slaying Tales from the Ancient Near East and India’ (257–62), Appendix B focuses on ‘Germanic Dragon Fights of the Eighth to Thirteenth Centuries AD’ (263–70), and Appendix C lists ‘A Selection of Dragon and Serpent-Slaying Tales of Folkloric Interest’ (271–80). Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers presents readers with an in-depth view of the history of dragon lore in the West. The writing is clear and the sources exceptionally well referenced, and the book will undoubtedly appeal to scholars, students, and dragon-fanciers alike.

Folklore Unbound: A Concise Introduction

on a particular motif or fairy-tale plot, instead focusing on the varied works produced by each author or artist and offering more of a general overview. Murai’s other aim in her study is to examine what insights a feminist analysis would provide on fairy-tale research in the West. Most importantly, as far as the author is concerned, it challenges the centrality of the West, and what she terms the ‘universalization’ of Euro-American interpretations of the fairy tale. Whilst the length of the work does limit contextualization, Murai is careful to offer some explanation and background about the archetypes, plotlines, and imagery that have their origins in Japanese rather than Western culture, allowing her to emphasize that, whilst certain concepts and images recur in stories all over the world, fairy tales always express ideas unique to the culture that produced them. Murai’s central arguments are that the exchange of ideas and influences is mutual—that Japanese authors and artists shape European fairy tales to suit Japanese tradition—rather than making the argument that plots and motifs from the West are universal. Murai also repeatedly emphasizes the impact locality has on art and stories. Some of the book’s most intriguing analysis focuses on interactive artworks that require participation, such as Kōnoike’s ‘Storytelling Table Runners’. In this project, participants embroider patterns on table runners based on stories collected from a small, tight-knit Japanese community, demonstrating how the artist appropriates handicrafts in order to embrace and preserve culturally-specific stories. Murai cites interactive dialogues between authors/artists and academic criticism as another area that requires more sustained study, allowing further development of the feminist fairy tale in Japan. From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl makes ample use of illustrations and samples of the chosen artists’ work in order to lend depth and clarity to its analysis—a sensible move given that a Western readership is likely to be unfamiliar with the majority of the artworks depicted. However, the author does occasionally lapse into description rather than analysis when examining her chosen cultural products. This is arguably quite necessary with the stories she scrutinizes, and lends some context to them. It is less necessary with some of the artwork, but Murai’s interpretations of the works are always interesting and well thought out. Despite its short length and its acknowledged limitations, this is an interesting and informative work.