Committee for «Folktales and the Internet»
Coordinator: dr. Theo Meder (Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam)
For more information see: T. Meder: 'From a Dutch Folktale Database towards an International Folktale Database', in: Fabula 51 (2010) 1-2, p. 6-22.
Ambition of the Committee
At the ISFNR conference in Tartu, Estonia (July 26-31 2005), one of the workshops was called 'Computer Mediated Communication - How Stuff Works?' chaired by Maria Yelenevskaya. During the discussion it was established that computer-mediated communication is already an important source for folk narrative research, and that the importance will only increase in the future. Folktales can be found on websites and in online databases, tales are told in discussion fora, jokes (either as text or as PhotoShopped images) are sent by e-mail, SMS or MMS. On the one hand the internet makes it easy for us to find the stories we are looking for, but on the other hand we all have experienced that stories that we could find yesterday seemed to have vanished today - just like in oral tradition. So for contemporary research it is necessary to collect those stories ourselves as well.
At the General Assembly of the ISFNR the birth of a committee on folktales and computer based communication was announced by Maria Yelenevskaya and several members had already volunteered to participate. On Maria's request, I later on agreed to coordinate the first steps of what I would like to call the Committee 'Folktales and the Internet'.
During the General Assembly in Athens in 2009 the members of the ISFNR expressed their support for the committee and several new members joined the group.
As far as I can see, the Committee could deal with the following matters:
1. Make the ISFNR acquainted with our existing online folktale databases. In Iceland, for instance, Terry Gunnell works on his Sagnagrunnur, in Flanders Katrien van Effelterre runs her Vlaamse Volksverhalenbank, and in The Netherlands I am managing my own Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank.
2. Make a list of other useful folktale collections or databases on the internet - be it in English, French, German, Russian, or Japanese etc.
3. Make a list of useful websites about folktale genres (like fairy tales, legends, myths, jokes, riddles and urban legends).
Most of the ISFNR members probably have their own private list of sites, and putting them together could be a benefit to us all.
4. Create an ISFNR database with international folktale material, for instance contemporary joke-lore (texts, pictures, powerpoint presentations, movies). The recently published book www.worldwidewitz.com. Humor im Cyberspace by Rolf W. Brednich could be a point of reference here. Creating such an ISFNR database will - technically and financially speaking - be the hardest part of the project, as well as encouraging participants to actively put material into this database. Obviously, the features of such a database need to be thourougly discussed in advance.
As far as I'm concerned, the membership is voluntary and free - free of charge as well - and we might want to recruit some more volunteers.
To begin with, contact through e-mail will suffice. Furthermore sessions will be organized at ISFNR conferences, like on the one in Athens 2009. In the long run, workshops could be organized between conferences.
I hope that the formation of the Committee will lead to more international cooperation and debate on questions like:
- How do we use the Internet for folk narrative research?
- How can we preserve the folktale material we find on the world wide web?
- How do we present our own folktale collections on-line?
- Can we enable our databases to work together?
- What kind of research do our collections of e-tales allow?
I hereby would like to invite more ISFNR members to join - just by sending me an e-mail.
Links
Members of the ISFNR Committee 'Folktales and the Internet'
Databases of ISFNR-members on-line
Folktale collections on the internet
Bibliography: books, articles etc. on folktales and internet
Towards an international database on folktales and PhotoShop-lore?