Motif indexes in the age of the Internet

Abstract

In the early twentieth-century Europe, international indexing systems and typologies were developed for folklore archives and research. Later, these indexes formed international standards. As an illustrative example of such international systems, mention may be made of such as the Thompson motif index of folk literature, and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type index. The problem presented in my article is to ponder, how to combine the traditional indexes of narrative folklore with the methodology of computer-based research. The problem with using the traditional motif indexes is that only very rare cases e.g. of Thompson’s index represent Caucasian, Siberian, Central Asian or East Asian traditions, and in general only a few non-European traditions are well represented. Luckily there exists the index developed recently by Yu.E. Berezkin and E.N. Duvakin, entitled “Thematic classification and distribution of folklore and mythological motives by area. Analytical catalog". This index encompasses massive corpuses of myths and other materials of folklore from all parts of the world.

An important direction of future research will involve advances from traditional typologies to cross-cultural digital typologies. In the era of digital humanities’, it is possible to enrich the motif indexes to include more traditions, so far not well represented in the previous indexes. Large datasets of “Big Data” offer great potential for developing new computational models. One way to combine modern computing network technology with traditional methods is to use web-ontologies as linked data. The advantage of the digital motif index is its universality: the digital code is language-independent. Digital, annotated corpuses combined with Internet-based type indexes can create a completely new tool for research of oral traditions.