'Much nonsense has been written on this subject', wrote Keith Thomas in a famous and influential footnote to his own pioneering chapter on English witchcraft in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In similar vein, Robin Briggs remarks near the st art of this magnificent new survey that 'common assumptions about the subject tend to have one very marked feature in common, which is that they are hopelessly wrong' (p. 9). The concept of witchcraft is notoriously slippery; scholarly research over the past quarter-century has barely changed the received ideas of most people. Some of what reputable and intelligent scholars have contributed to the subject has proved at best untypical of the wider witchcraft phenomenon, at worst seriously misleading. Robin Briggs has devoted many years to meticulous examination of a large body of trial records of witchcraft cases from the Duchy of Lorraine in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this book he has brought the insights from that research to a synt hesis and survey of the social context of all early modern witchcraft cases in western Europe and New England. The resulting book will have a deeply corrosive effect on all sorts of traditional wisdom about the subject of witchcraft and society.

Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft

Since January 2020, the Contemporary Folklore Monitoring research team has been studying the specifics of the infodemic in Russia (infodemic refers to widely circulated rumors, pseudoscientific remedies, conspiracy theories and denialism related to the COVID-19 epidemic). The study aims to describe what the infodemic involves and how it spreads. The authors draw two databases: (1) texts from the Russian social media collected using the Medialogia tool (167 narratives), and (2) cases of criminal and administrative trials against citizens for disseminating ‘inaccurate information’ (rumors) about the coronavirus and ways to fight that (203 cases).
Based on the quantitative and qualitative data analysis, the authors describe how the infodemic is ‘arranged’, what topics are popular, and why they are popular; they analyze what triggers the infodemic ‘waves’; and what types of narrative circulated through informal channels of communication may pose danger to public health or can be considered dangerous by the court.
Acknowledgements. The study is part of the RANEPA state assignment research program.
Our research group expresses its heartfelt gratitude to Maria Shklyaruk and Mikhail Benyukhis, without whose help the work on the paper would not have been possible, to our colleagues  Dr Ian Brodie, Dr Aglaya Starostina, Dr Anna Kirzyuk, Dr Iosif Zislin and Sergey Belyanin, for their help in the work on the article, the human-right watch organizations OVD-Info and Agora "for providing results of their monitoring, Ilya Ferapontov, editor of N + 1, for providing a platform for operational publications, as well as all our correspondents who, sparing no effort and time, found and sent us more and more examples of rumors and fakes.

/pdf/puti-rossiiskoi-infodemii-ot-whatsapp-do-sledstvennogo-553pyr6r1u.pdf

Пути российской инфодемии: от whatsapp до следственного комитета


 Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (Old Poems of the Finnish People) is a collection of nearly 90,000 oral folk poems written down between 1564 and the early 20th century. It is characterized by frequent reoccurrence of similar pieces of text on various levels (from entire poems, through passages to single verses and collocations). However, finding these similarities is challenging due to a high degree of orthographical, morphological, and compositional variation. In this article, we propose a method for automatically identifying equivalent verses, i.e. verses conveying the same meaning with the same words, using a clustering based on cosine similarity of character bigram vectors. The method achieves around 81% F-score and has been successfully used for identifying similarities across the entire SKVR corpus on the level of verse, passage, and poem. The results can be browsed through a Web interface.

Exploring Finnic written oral folk poetry through string similarity

Intangible Cultural Heritage Based on AR Technology

A ineiston tuottamisen, käsittelemisen ja lukemisen käytännöt vaikuttavat monin tavoin siihen, minkälainen käsitys ja minkälaisia tutkimustuloksia tietystä ilmiöstä on saatavissa. Kalevalamittaisen runouden kohdalla se, miten aineistoa on tallennettu, tekstualisoitu, valikoitu, jaoteltu, arkistoitu, kortistoitu, luetteloitu, julkaistu ja analysoitu luo pohjan sille, mitä nykytutkija aineistosta ja itse ilmiöstä voi ymmärtää ja tavoittaa. Vaikka kalevalamittaisen runon keskeisimmät aineistot ovat olleet viisitoista vuotta käytössä sähköisinä, ei tutkimuksessa ole juurikaan pohdittu, mitä tämä käyttömuodon muutos tarkoittaa tutkimuksen käytäntöjen ja mahdollisuuksien kannalta (ks. kuitenkin Harvilahti 2013; Ilyefalvi 2018; Tangherlini 2016).

/pdf/suullisen-runon-sahkoisesta-lukemisesta-382ab1s4q1.pdf

Suullisen runon sähköisestä lukemisesta

The study examines the problems and possibilities presented by the digitization of national folklore archives and collections in the wider context of folklore archiving and digital humanities. The primary goal of the study is to present a problem-oriented and critical overview of the available digital databases containing folklore texts (WossiDiA, Sagragrunnur, ETKSpace, Danish Folklore Nexus, Nederlandse VolksverhalenBank, The Schools’ Collection, etc.), and of the analyses conducted on these using computational methods. The paper first presents a historical overview of the conceptualization that went into the creation of folklore databases (genre-centered, collector, and collection-centered approaches), followed by a discussion of the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of digital content creation (crowdsourcing, markup languages, TEI, digital critical editions, etc.). The study then takes a look at the new digital tools and methods applied in the analysis of digitized folklore texts (text-mining, network theory methods, data visualization), and finally places databases and computational folkloristics within a larger theoretical framework.

/pdf/the-theoretical-methodological-and-technical-issues-of-45t8e2zjui.pdf

The theoretical, methodological and technical issues of digital folklore databases and computational folkloristics

Gabor Klaniczay & Eva Pocs, eds. 2017. Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania . Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-319-54755-8 978-3-319-54756-5.

/pdf/witchcraft-and-demonology-topics-methods-and-trends-in-2v1134lob1.pdf

Witchcraft and Demonology – Topics, Methods and Trends in Witchcraft Research in Hungary, 2017

During the corpus-building operation of the Digital Database of Hungarian Verbal Charms we tried to augment the available material by the inclusion of witness statements of witch trials conducted in early modern Bihar County and the town of Debrecen. My paper explores the kinds of dilemmas and issues we were faced with concentrating especially on generic questions of verbal charms. As regards the exploration of early modern written sources of vernacular language use the most relevant recent approaches came from historical speech act research. Therefore, in the context of the corpus building project I shall also discuss to which extends the results of historical pragmatics, historical speech act research can offer any help (and if so, what kind of help) in solving the generic problems and questions of verbal magic.1

/pdf/dilemmas-of-corpus-construction-beyond-folklore-collections-madf2y1upf.pdf

Dilemmas of Corpus Construction beyond Folklore Collections: Threat as a Speech Act in Early Modern Witchcraft Trials

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The theoretical, methodological and technical issues of digital folklore databases and computational folkloristics

Witchcraft and Demonology – Topics, Methods and Trends in Witchcraft Research in Hungary, 2017

Dilemmas of Corpus Construction beyond Folklore Collections: Threat as a Speech Act in Early Modern Witchcraft Trials