The elusive tale: leveraging the study of information seeking and knowledge organization to improve access to and discovery of folktales

Abstract

The "Folktales and Facets" project proposes ways to enhance access to folktales-in written and audiovisual formats-through the systematic and rigorous development of user-focused and task-focused models of information representation. Methods used include cognitive task analysis and facet analysis to better understand the information-seeking and information-use practices of people working with folktales and the intellectual dimensions of the domain. Interviews were conducted with 9 informants, representing scholars, storytellers, and teachers who rely on folktales in their professional lives to determine common tasks across user groups. Four tasks were identified: collect, create, instruct, and study. Facet analysis was conducted on the transcripts of these interviews, and a representative set of literature that included subject indexing material and a random stratified set of document surrogates drawn from a collection of folktales, including bibliographic records, introductions, reviews, tables of contents, and bibliographies. Eight facets were identified as most salient for this group of users: agent, association, context, documentation, location, subject, time, and viewpoint. Implications include the need for systems designers to devise methods for harvesting and integrating extant contextual material into search and discovery systems, and to take into account user-desired features in the development of enhanced services for digital repositories.

Classifying the humanities

“…The danger in classifying art is the same as the danger encountered above with respect to the scholarship of art: that we become captured by the themes thought to be important at some place and time. LaBarre and Tilley (2012) discuss the (admittedly valuable) efforts to classify folktales in terms of a hundred or so themes. The leading classification of this type would classify “Beauty and the Beast” as falling under “Tales of Magic,” then “Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative,” and more precisely “The Girl as the Bear's Wife.” Despite their widespread use, such “motif and tale type indices” are subject to frequent criticism.…”

“…Even written texts can be changed through time. In their study of a random sample of folktales, LaBarre and Tilley (2012) found that “illustrators were identified more than 80% of the time, although the original author was identified just over 40% of the time. Records of stories that were retold indicated an agent in only one third of the instances, and editors or compilers were acknowledged in only one quarter of the records.…”

Using Crowdsourcing to Investigate Perception of Narrative Similarity

“…With the increasing digitization of folk narratives [1,16,19], there is a need for better search and clustering systems [12]. However, so far little is known about how humans perceive narrative similarity.…”

Folktale Classification Using Learning to Rank

“…This serves multiple purposes. First, with the increasing digitization of folktales [15,18,1], there is a need to (semi) automate the identification of story types. Second, such a system could help discover new relationships between stories.…”