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Computational Folkloristics

Call for Papers

Special Issue of the Journal of American Folklore edited by
Timothy R. Tangherlini

            Over the course of the past decade, a revolution has
            occurred in the materials available for the study of
            folklore. The scope of digital archives of
            traditional expressive forms has exploded, and the
            magnitude of machine-readable materials available for
            consideration has increased by many orders of
            magnitude. Manynational archives have made
            significant efforts to make their archival resources
            machine-readable, while other smaller initiatives
            have focused on the digitization of archival
            resources related to smaller regions, a single
            collector, or a single genre. Simultaneously, the
            explosive growth in social media, web logs (blogs),
            and other Internet resources have made previously
            hard to access forms of traditional expressive
            culture accessible at a scale so large that it is
            hard to fathom. These developments, coupled to the
            development of algorithmic approaches to the analysis
            of large, unstructured data and new methods for the
            visualization of the relationships discovered by
            these algorithmic approaches-from mapping to 3-D
            embedding, from time-lines to navigable
            visualizations-offer folklorists new opportunities
            for the analysis of traditional expressive forms. We
            label approaches to the study of folklore that
            leverage the power of these algorithmic approaches
            "Computational Folkloristics" (Abello, Broadwell,
            Tangherlini 2012).

            The Journal of American Folklore invites papers for
            consideration for inclusion in a special issue of the
            journal edited by Timothy Tangherlini that focuses on
            "Computational Folkloristics." The goal of the
            special issue is to reveal how computational methods
            can augment the study of folklore, and propose
            methods that can extend the traditional reach of the
            discipline. To avoid confusion, we term those
            approaches "computational" that make use of
            algorithmic methods to assist in the interpretation
            of relationships or structures in the underlying
            data. Consequently, "Computational Folkloristics" is
            distinct from Digital Folklore in the application of
            computation to a digital representation of a corpus.

We are particularly interested in papers that focus on: the
automatic discovery of narrative structure; challenges in Natural
Language Processing (NLP) related to unlabeled, multilingual data
including named entity detection and resolution; topic modeling
and other methods that explore latent semantic aspects of a
folklore corpus; the alignment of folklore data with external
historical datasets such as census records; GIS applications and
methods; network analysis methods for the study of, among other
things, propagation, community detection and influence; rapid
classification of unlabeled folklore data; search and discovery
on and across folklore corpora; modeling of folklore processes;
automatic labeling of performance phenomena in visual data;
automatic classification of audio performances. Other novel
approaches to the study of folklore that make use of algorithmic
approaches will also be considered.

A significant challenge of this special issue is to address these
issues in a manner that is directly relevant to the community of
folklorists (as opposed to computer scientists). Articles should
be written in such a way that the argument and methods are
accessible and understandable for an audience expert in folklore
but not expert in computer science or applied mathematics. To
that end, we encourage team submissions that bridge the gap
between these disciplines. If you are in doubt about whether your
approach or your target domain is appropriate for consideration
in this special issue, please email the issue editor,
TimothyTangherlini at tango_(at)_humnet.ucla.edu, using the subject
line "Computational Folkloristics-query". Deadline for all
queries is April 1, 2013.

            All papers must conform to the Journal of American
            Folklore's style sheet for authors. The guidelines
            for article submission are as follows: Essay
            manuscripts should be no more than 10,000 words in
            length, including abstract, notes, and bibliography.
            The article must begin with a 50- to 75-word abstract
            that summarizes the essential points and findings of
            the article. Whenever possible, authors should submit
            two copies of their manuscripts by email attachment
            to the editor of the special issue at:
            tango_(at)_humnet.ucla.edu. The first copy should be sent
            in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (rtf) and
            should include the author's name. Figures should not
            be included in this document, but "call outs" should
            be used to designate where figures should be placed
            (e.g., ""). A list at the end
            of the article (placed after the bibliography) should
            detail the figures to be included, along with their
            captions. The second copy of the manuscript should be
            sent in Portable Document Format (pdf). This version
            should not include the author's name or any
            references within the text that would identify the
            author to the manuscript reviewers. Passages that
            would identify the author can be marked in the
            following manner to indicate excised words: (****).
            Figures should be embedded in this version just as
            they would ideally be placed in the published text.
            Possible supplementary materials (e.g., additional
            photographs, sound files, video footage, etc.) that
            mightaccompany the article in its online version
            should be described in a cover letter addressed to
            the editor. An advisory board for the special issue
            consisting of folklorists and computerscientists will
            initially consider all papers. Once accepted for the
            special issue, all articles will be subject to the
            standard refereeing procedure for the journal.
            Deadline for submissions for consideration is June
            15, 2013. Initial decisions will be made by August 1,
            2013. Final decisions will be made by October 1,
            2013. We expect the issue to appear in 2014.

ATT00001

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