Timothy Tangherlini

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Scandinavian

Social media is a breeding ground for threat narratives and related conspiracy theories. In these, an outside group threatens the integrity of an inside group, leading to the emergence of sharply defined group identities: Insiders -- agents with whom the authors identify and Outsiders -- agents who threaten the insiders. Inferring the members of th...

Social reading sites offer an opportunity to capture a segment of readers’ responses to literature, while data-driven analysis of these responses can provide new critical insight into how people ‘read’. Posts discussing an individual book on the social reading site, Goodreads , are referred to as ‘reviews’, and consist of summaries, opinions, quote...

Readers' responses to literature have received scant attention in computational literary studies. The rise of social media offers an opportunity to capture a segment of these responses while data-driven analysis of these responses can provide new critical insight into how people "read". Posts discussing an individual book on Goodreads, a social med...

Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the COVID-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of scientific consensus on the virus’s spread and containment, or on the long-term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories...

Although a great deal of attention has been paid to how conspiracy theories circulate on social media and their factual counterpart conspiracies, there has been little computational work done on describing their narrative structures. We present an automated pipeline for the discovery and description of the generative narrative frameworks of conspir...

Is it just a conspiracy theory, or an actual conspiracy? In episode 81, Tim Tangherlini from the University of California Berkeley’s Folklore Program discusses his research into how conspiracy theorists interpret and use what they believe is “hidden knowledge” to connect multiple human interactions that are otherwise unlinked … and how when one of...

Although a great deal of attention has been paid to how conspiracy theories circulate on social media, and the deleterious effect that they, and their factual counterpart conspiracies, have on political institutions, there has been little computational work done on describing their narrative structures. Predicating our work on narrative theory, we...

Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus on the virus, its spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemi...

Reader reviews of literary fiction on social media, especially those in persistent, dedicated forums, create and are in turn driven by underlying narrative frameworks. In their comments about a novel, readers generally include only a subset of characters and their relationships, thus offering a limited perspective on that work. Yet in aggregate, th...

Classification is a vexing problem in folkloristics. Although broad genre classifications such as "ballad", "folktale", "legend", "proverb", and "riddle" are well established and widely accepted, these formal classifications are coarse and do little more than provide a first level sort on materials for collections that can easily include tens, if n...

In Scandinavia, the folklore collection of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with rapid changes in political, economic, and social organization, and resulted in national collections of extraordinary scope. Although some later folklorists have expressed skepticism about the usefulness of these collections as resources for the st...

The Modern Breakthrough marks an important turn towards realism in Scandinavian literature, and is broadly recognized as one of the most important periods in modern Nordic literary history. Georg Brandes's lectures on main currents in nineteenth century European literature at the University of Copenhagen and his later work Det moderne gennembruds m...

An analysis of more than eight years of data from vaccination forums on mothering.com shows that the antivaccination movement is well-organized and widely dispersed, and that it emerged long before concerns about immunity were expressed. The findings are evidence of a formidable challenge to the social norms surrounding vaccination.

Since the inception of the field of folkloristics in the early nineteenth century, scholars have paid considerable attention to the relationship between place and folklore. An important yet largely overlooked question is how individuals in a tradition group, through their storytelling, negotiate the conceptualization of their local environment. In...

Classification is a vexing problem in folkloristics. Although broad genre classifications such as "ballad", "folktale", "legend", "proverb", and "riddle" are well established and widely accepted, these formal classifications are coarse and do little more than provide a first level sort on materials for collections that can easily include tens, if n...

Researchers of traditional storytelling are largely limited to existing indices for the discovery of stories. These indices rarely include geo-indexing, despite a fundamental premise of folkloristics that stories are closely related to the physical environment. Consequently, it is often difficult for folklore researchers to address questions that r...

Background Social media offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore how people talk about health care at a very large scale. Numerous studies have shown the importance of websites with user forums for people seeking information related to health. Parents turn to some of these sites, colloquially referred to as “mommy blogs,” to share concerns abo...

Recent work in literary sentiment analysis has suggested that shifts in emotional valence may serve as a reliable proxy for plot movement in novels. The raw sentiment time series of a novel can now be extracted using a variety of different methods, and after extraction, filtering is commonly used to smooth the irregular sentiment time series. Using...

God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings. By Laurel Kendall , Jongsung Yang , and Yul Soo Yoon . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 160 pp.. ISBN: 9780824847647 (cloth, also available in paper). - Volume 75 Issue 4 - Timothy R. Tangherlini

We present IceMorph, a semi-supervised morphosyntactic analyzer of Old Icelandic. In addition to machine-read corpora and dictionaries, it applies a small set of declension prototypes to map corpus words to dictionary entries. A web-based GUI allows expert users to modify and augment data through an online process. A machine learning module incorpo...

We explore the scholarly concerns and technical considerations involved in creating a digital interface to the folklore collections of Evald Tang Kristensen (1843-1929), one of the world’s most prolific collectors of folklore. The two interfaces we designed, the Danish Folklore Nexus (DFL 1.0) and ETKSpace (DFL 2.0), represent differing approaches...

This recent collection of essays exploring aspects of cultural heritage, its display, and, as the editors frame it, its “performance,” provides an interesting series of case studies, all interrogating the idea of Norden and examining how different institutions, groups, and individuals across the region have engaged this idea, either explicitly or i...

Given a small, well-understood corpus that is of interest to a Humanities scholar, we propose sub-corpus topic modeling (STM) as a tool for discovering meaningful passages in a larger collection of less well-understood texts. STM allows Humanities scholars to discover unknown passages from the vast sea of works that Moretti calls the “great unread”...

Folklorists are poised on the cusp of an exciting new era. The digital revolution has swept over the field of folklore, vastly increasing the amount of accessible research material. To take advantage of these changes, folklorists must develop consistent methods for digitizing, storing, retrieving, displaying and interpreting these materials. Comput...

The 2007 television Christmas calendar, Yallahrup Færgeby/‘Yallahrup Ferry Town’, upsets the normal conventions of Danish television Christmas specials, shifting attention away from the cosy aspects of the holiday season, and towards unsettling aspects of the contemporary urban Danish landscape. The 24-episode series, which uses puppets as part of...

The aim of any computational folkloristic investigation is to understand how traditional expressions create meaning for the people who create and receive them. or the most part, folklorists limit their studies to small, well-defined collections or subsets of much larger collections. A study corpus is often selected based on criteria like genre or t...

Mette Hjort's masterful analysis of Lone Scherfig's 2000 film Italian for Beginners is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on contemporary Danish film and the Dogma film movement. Scherfig's remarkably popular film dramatically extended the relatively short reach of the Dogma films from their reified perch as challenging art films into t...

Lotte World squats on its huge haunches like a concrete hippopotamus near the southern banks of the Han River in a neighborhood known as Chamsil.1 Kang Nae-hui suggests that "in Seoul . . . all . . . roads lead to Lotte World," and he is not far off the mark (1995). Major thoroughfares and a large expressway bring thousands of visitors each day by...

I examine the social and economic position of the beggar/wandering indigent in late nineteenth century Denmark (post constitution), and I explore reasons for the ubiquity of these stories in the repertoires of Jutlandic storytellers. These stories point to an ongoing negotiation among tradition participants of their views concerning the social stat...

This chapter focuses on Lotte World, billed by its giant parent conglomerate as the world's largest indoor amusement park and shopping mall. Lotte World embraces both the inauthentic and the unoriginal. Its theme parks borrow, perhaps even steal, design features from other parks, and its shopping mall draws frequent attention to the supporting role...

This book explores the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” It describes the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditi...

Maps can play an important role in understanding the close connection between individuals, their lived environment and their story repertoires. The legend genre is particularly related to local environment. Although the original historic-geographic method proposed by Kaarle and Julius Krohn has been largely abandoned by folklorists, the role the ma...

Laurel Kendall’s latest book on Korean shamanism is an ethnographic tour-deforce that provides significant and nuanced theoretical insight into the ever-changing realm of shamanic practice in South Korea. Kendall has the remarkable vantage point of having spent nearly four decades living with, talking to, and learning from a large number of Korean...

Buried in the thousands of pages of Evald Tang Kristensen’s remarkable collection of nineteenth century Danish folklore is an amusing, yet shockingly obscene, story told by “Bitte” Jens Kristensen, a cobbler and smallholder from northern Jutland. Tang Kristensen’s decision to break the story into three parts, publishing two of those parts separatel...

Buried in the thousands of pages of Evald Tang Kristensen's remarkable collection of nineteenth Century Danish folklore is an amusing, yet shockingly obscene, story told by "Bitte" Jens Kristensen, a cobbler and smallholder from northern Jutland. Tang Kristensen's decision to break the story into three parts, publishing two ofthose parts separately...

Arranged around a set of provocative themes, the essays in this volume engage in the discussion from various critical perspectives on Korean geography. Part One, "Geographies of the (Colonial) City," focuses on Seoul during the Japanese colonial occupation from 1910-1945 and the lasting impact of that period on the construction of specific places i...

Seen from seven hundred kilometers out in space, the Korean Peninsula is unremarkable. Browns, grays, and streaks of white in the north give way to slightly greener patches in the south, indicating different topographical features, while the deep blues of the ocean on all three sides confirm that it is indeed a peninsula. A satellite image tells th...

Journal of Folklore Research 43.1 (2006) 75-77 Zipes's exploration of Hans Christian Andersen's literary works arrives just in time for the tail end of the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Andersen's birth. Through a series of essays, Zipes proposes that H.C. Andersen is, and has always been, misunderstood as a storyteller (a positio...

In the field of folklore, the study of “oral tradition” cannot be an either/or proposition. Rather, the responsible study of oral tradition recognizes the interdependence of both of these concepts: while “oral” clearly modifies “tradition,” there is an equally important coloring of “oral” by “tradition.” “Oral” indicates both speech and reception,...

Among paramedics, part of the working day consists of telling stories about emergency responses - rehashing the events that are the raison d'être of their profession. In the downtime between calls, the medics attempt to fit the day's events into their broader conception of their work. Among the medics in my fieldwork area, I have found a deeply cyn...

L'analyse des trois types de contes de Cendrillon presents en Coree (« K'ongjwi P'atjwi ») montre que d'une part, la tradition coreenne est plus proche de la tradition chinoise que japonaise, et que d'autre part, la religion joue un role fondamental dans cette legende (confucianisme et bouddhisme, devotion filiale, reincarnation de la mere dans la...

The authors describe the Yŏngdŭng kut held in Sunshine Village, on Cheju Island. The kut ceremonies are described in light of the narrative myth of the Yŏngdŭng grandfather legend. Both the welcoming and farewell kut are described, together with oral narratives provided by several village informants. The authors conclude that the Yŏngdŭng kut play...

This article examines the various forms the plague assumes in the legend traditions of Scandinavia. Eight new legend types are proposed in an effort to expand the existing type-index to more adequately describe the legend corpus. Common to all traditions are legends concerning the aftermath of the plague. The legends of Norway and Sweden often pres...

Thesis (A.B., Honors)--Harvard University, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62).