Sanita Reinsone

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia

At the beginning of the Cold War, tens of thousands of Baltic people headed for the forests. It was the largest and longest such experience of human and forest interaction in the history of the three Baltic countries. The forest was turned into a political concept and had abruptly become a doubly sensitive zone: to the authorities it was a space of...

The end of the WWII proved to be a significant turning point in the history of the Baltic States, one that dramatically changed the life course of its residents. For ideological reasons and for personal safety many thousands of people, among them many women, flooded into the Baltic forests at the beginning of the Cold War, in order to resist the So...

The turn of the 20th century saw a large-scale voluntary emigration of Latgalians to Siberia. The descendants of Latgalian emigrants still live in the villages founded by their predecessors. In the article the author examines the image of the Latgalian emigrants created by the printed media of the period, which carefully followed the process of emi...

Poetics and mythology of Latvian folk songs (till 1994), history of Latvian folkloristics, Latvian traditional and contemporary legends, folk tales and children’s folklore, folklore in the Soviet period and on the Internet, folklore movement, contemporary storytelling and storytellers, etc.

Story of Adam: Life, Habits and Virtues of Mazsalaca Parish Inhabitants in the autobiography of Adams Purmalis ca. 1900. Adams Purmalis was uneducated peasant born born in 1847 who wrote a diary about his life found by Sanita Reinsone. The autobiography is rich of ethnographic details of his household and local society. The book provides full pub...

At the beginning of 2022, a simplistic word-guessing game took the world by storm and was further adapted to many languages beyond the original English version. In this paper, we examine the strategies of daily word-guessing game players that have evolved during a period of over two years. A survey gathered from 25% of frequent players reveals thei...

At the beginning of 2022, a simplistic word-guessing game took the world by storm and was further adapted to many languages beyond the original English version. In this paper, we examine the strategies of daily word-guessing game players that have evolved during a period of over two years. A survey gathered from 25% of frequent players reveals thei...

Open speech corpora of substantial size are seldom available for less-spoken languages, and this was recently the case also for Latvian with its 1.5M native speakers. While there exist several closed Latvian speech corpora of 100+ hours, used to train competitive models for automatic speech recognition (ASR), there were only a few tiny open dataset...

Since February 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine by Russia has affected the entire population of Ukraine, including the scientific community. The attack by Russian forces has resulted in the destruction of infrastructure of Ukrainian cities, including universities, research centers, and educational institutions. Millions of people, including educators...

This paper deals with the automatic detection of dates in a corpus of digitized, hand-written diaries in Latvian. Date detection is an important step in processing diaries’ corpus, as it allows to split the source texts by dates of entries and carry out diachronic analysis for separate diaries and compare metrics across different authors. This pape...

The paper outlines initial experience of using transcription as a tool to promote deep reading and understanding of cultural heritage. The experience is a side activity of a project, which aims to improve the database of Latvian folk songs. Use of transcription appeared beneficial not only in terms of elaborating a data base, but also for stimulati...

In this paper, we describe adaptation of a simple word guessing game that occupied the hearts and minds of people around the world. There are versions for all three Baltic countries and even several versions of each. We specifically pay attention to the Latvian version and look into how people form their guesses given any already uncovered hints. T...

A mainstream tendency for multimediality of information and exponential growth of data have promoted major changes in the academic paradigm, supporting the transition towards interdisciplinary research-based studies, which has affected the development of the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH). The paper aims at providing insights into the di...

A mainstream tendency for multimediality of information and exponential growth of data have promoted major changes in the academic paradigm, supporting the transition towards interdisciplinary research-based studies, which has affected the development of the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH). The paper aims at providing insights into the di...

In this paper, we describe adaptation of a simple word guessing game that occupied the hearts and minds of people around the world. There are versions for all three Baltic countries and even several versions of each. We specifically pay attention to the Latvian version and look into how people form their guesses given any already uncovered hints. T...

The paper recounts the process of organizing and running the virtual Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries Conference (DHN2020) after the original conference was rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic and provides an overview of the papers published in the second volume of the proceedings of the conference.

The paper recounts the process of organizing and running the virtual Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries Conference (DHN2020) after the original conference was rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic and provides an overview of the papers published in the second volume of the proceedings of the conference.

The paper provides insight into the programme construction of the 5th conference Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN) that was to have taken place in Riga in March 2020 and an analysis of the DHN conferences during the last three years by exploring participant activity per country focusing primarily on the Nordic and Baltic region, thei...

The paper provides insight into the programme construction of the 5th conference Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN) that was to have taken place in Riga in March 2020 and an analysis of the DHN conferences during the last three years by exploring participant activity per country focusing primarily on the Nordic and Baltic region, thei...

The chapter deals with the personal dimension of intangible heritage crowdsourcing by bringing into focus high-level participants who devote their time to cultural heritage crowdsourcing on a regular basis. The case study presented is based on a crowdsourcing initiative carried out by the Archives of Latvian Folklore (ALF) since June 2016. The chap...

The data presented in this article is in support of the research paper "Medicinal plants and their uses recorded in the Archives of Latvian Folklore from the 19th century" [1]. This article provides the list of plant species and disorders treated with medicinal plants mentioned in the records of Latvian folk medicine and used by indigenous people o...

Ethnopharmacological relevance: The records of folk medicine present historical evidence of medicinal plant usage in the territory of Latvia and describe native and imported plants and plant products that were used as medicine. Aim of the study: To collect and analyse the ethnobotanical knowledge found in records of Latvian folk medicine availab...

The disciplinary foundation for the study of folklore and ethnography in Latvian higher education began with the creation of the Baltic republics in 1918, after which new or reformed national universities were possible. The academic study of traditional culture was integrated into the curriculum of higher education along with the founding of the Un...

In Europe and beyond, the formation and development of tradition archives has been primarily linked to active societal involvement. The networks of collectors and informants, en masse collecting campaigns, centralized submission of collected materials to folklore archives, calls for action published in national and local newspapers, etc. were and s...

Svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv No. 141, 2018. The Swedish ethnologist Dag Trotzig (1914–44) spent almost two years of his short life in Latvia. On the recommendation of Sigurd Erixon, he arrived in Riga in 1938, soon after gaining his bachelor’s degree at Stockholm University, to take over the teaching of ethnography at the University of Lat...

This book (published in Latvian) provides the first major study in Latvia on the theme of getting lost. Apart from the subject, it discusses such issues as the interaction of individual and cultural experiences in oral stories, the influence of the audience on the creation of stories, as well as the traditions of disbelief. However, the study has n...

In recent years, projects providing tools and inviting volunteers to transform digital content from one format into another have become one of the most widespread phenomena among Digital Humanities research and cultural heritage institutions. One such tool is transcription, which is still one of the most common forms of crowdsourcing in digital hum...

Latvian Folkloristics in the Interwar Period is a contribution by Latvian scholars to the current reflexive trend of folklore studies toward an intense focus on the discipline’s past. It also joins the recent efforts to broaden the geographical scope of folklore history by concentrating on internationally less represented research traditions. The i...