Folklorist Timothy Tangherlini Discusses Current Project on Folklore and Geographic Information Systems

Dr. Tangherlini will present and discuss his current project Sites of (re)Collection:  A Digital Approach to the Folklore Collection of Evald Tang Kristensen. This project, for which Dr. Tangherlini was awarded a 2009 American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, spans the fields and practices of folklore, cultural geography, ethnography, geographic information systems (GIS) and the digital humanities. It focuses on the Evald Tang Kristensen collection, the world’s largest folklore collection produced by an individual. The goal of the project is to reanimate the archive through the use of advanced mapping and visualization tools, and to develop an infrastructure for other similar projects that allows for the straight-forward acquisition of digital assets, editing, map creation, and publication in multiple formats. It provides a rich navigational interface that allows users to make use of advanced GIS, statistical learning, and text-corpus visualization tools. This enables a “thick” approach to archival materials through historical mapping, pattern discovery, and information navigation.

The presentation is scheduled for Monday, May 3, 7:20 - 10:00 pm in the Johnson Center, Third Floor, Room F.