Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends (ISEBEL)

FAIN: HJ-253428-17

UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)
Timothy R. Tangherlini (Project Director: June 2016 to January 2026)
Christoph Schmitt (Co Project Director: June 2016 to January 2026)
Theo Meder (Co Project Director: June 2016 to January 2026)

Participating institutions:
University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA) - Applicant/Recipient
Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam) - Participating Institution
University of Rostock Zentrale (Mecklenburg) - Participating Institution

A collaboration among an international team of folklore scholars and computer scientists to develop analytical techniques for studying folkloric traditions across multiple national databases. The project team includes researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (US), University of Rostock (Germany), and Meertens Institute (Netherlands). Co-funding provided by DFG (Germany) and NWO (Netherlands).

ISEBEL provides intelligent search and analysis across three of the world’s largest machine actionable folklore collections (Dutch Folktale Database-Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam, the Danish Folktale Database-UCLA, and the Mecklenburger Folklore Database-WossiDiA, Rostock) presenting the opportunity for large scale data-driven research into traditional folk expressive culture. By facilitating search, discovery and analysis across all three collections, ISEBEL provides researchers an unprecedented opportunity to discover patterns both within and across the target corpora. The proposed research, focusing on storytellers, legends and the dispersion of beliefs in magic, witchcraft, hauntings and supernatural beings seeks to reveal what ordinary people believed, and how storytelling traditions and story repertoires differed in and across these three areas.