The Forager Folklore Database (FFDB) registers bibliographical references to published myths and folktales from hunter-gatherer (forager1) societies as recorded by anthropologists, linguists, missionaries and others during the past c.150 years. It shall serve as a starting point for empirical investigations pursuing interests as diverse as in narrative universals, evolutionary origins of storytelling, or comparative mythology and folklore studies.
The narratives included in the FFDB are being thoroughly selected according to the criteria of (1) authenticity of originating from a foraging culture, and (2) quality of documentation (ideally, in original-language text and translation). As far as represented in the sources, the database includes metadata regarding the narrator (informant), collector, and time and place of the recording.
Out of the total number of thusly source-tracked narratives, the FFDB will also define a representative sample of narratives balanced in terms of geographical regions, language families, and genre. Tales included in the sample will be further enriched by metadata concerning content and narrative structure, generated by manual coding.
In addition, and as far as copyright licences allow, we will provide digital texts of the narratives in English translations as TEI-P5-encoded XML, enriched by semi-automatic tagging.
This is a work-in-progress repository. Until the first official release it is not citable and only contains a few specimens of our efforts in preparing the XMLs. We are happy to receive comments and advise of all sorts.
While many of the semantic and narratological features of the tales can only be identified by a human eye and are best indicated in the form of metadata, some of them can also be tracked on the lexical level and are thus indicated in the form of in-line tags in the digital texts. We are employing a manual and semi-automatic (via WordNet synsets, wordlists, and glossaries) annotation of animal, plant, color, personal, and place names. Also, as the texts are transcriptions of oral performances, we mark the difference between the diegetic level of the actual narrative on the one hand, and interjections, framing and explanatory comments on the other. For the latter, we distinguish between meta-commentaries in the beginning of (<anamyth>), during (<apartmyth>), and in concluding (<epimyth>) the narrative.
Since one of our general ambitions is to preserve all work done by previous scholars, the FFDB also includes as metadata the painstaking classifications of motifs and tale types that have been done in the tradition of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. We have digitized the motif/tale type assignments in the latest editions of these standard references2 and are working on translating their way of citing individual narratives into our own; and we are adding motif classifications done since, as far as they are relevant to our corpus.3 This will not only effect a fine-grained content analysis of the FFDB but also provide an important new corpus for machine learning approaches towards automatic motif recognition.
Katja Mellmann (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (University of Oregon)
Jan Jokisch (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (Project no. 463393271, Funding Period: 2022-2025)
(README last updated on August 31, 2023.)
Footnotes
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Cf. Ember, Carol R. (2020): Hunter-Gatherers (Foragers). Human Relations Area Files, https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc/summaries/hunter-gatherers. ↩
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Thompson, Stith (1955-58): Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends. Rev. and enl. ed. 6 vls. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press;
Uther, Hans-Jörg (2004): The Types of International Folktales. A Classification and Bibliography, based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. 3 vls. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. ↩ -
E.g., Wilbert, Johannes/Simoneau, Karin (1970-92): Folk Literature of South American Indians. 24 vls. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications;
Schmidt, Sigrid (1989/2013): Catalogue of the Khoisan Folktales of Southern Africa [1989]. 2., completely rev. ed. 2 vls. Köln: Köppe, 2013. ↩