Folklore Tracks: Historical GIS and Folklore Collection in 19th Century Denmark Ida Storm a,b,c,d UCLA
[email protected] Holly Nicol c UCLA
[email protected] Georgia Broughton c UCLA
[email protected] Timothy R. Tangherlini a,b,c,e UCLA
[email protected] a Conceived of the project b Developed methods and workflow c Extracted and cleaned data d Developed visualizations: maps, charts, graphs e Wrote text Keywords: historical GIS, folklore, history of folklore, ethnography, fieldwork Abstract The “golden age” of folklore collection in 19th century Scandinavia coincided with rapid changes in political, economic, and social organization as well as the rise of the Scandinavian countries broadly conceived of as “nations”. The large folklore collections created during this period were a result of broad field collecting efforts across the region. Tracing the routes of folklorists as they conducted fieldwork helps us discern the developing conceptions of the nation and its cultural boundaries, as well as identify the areas that were most associated, in the minds of collectors, publishers, and scholars, with the cultural locus of the nation. Unraveling the fieldwork methods of early folklore collectors is not a trivial undertaking, and requires a combination of archival research and modern computational methods to reverse engineer the processes by which their collections were created. In this paper, we show how techniques from GIS used in conjunction with time-tested archival research methods can reveal how a folklore collection came into being. Our target corpus is the folklore collections of the Danish school teacher, Evald Tang Kristensen (1843-1929) who, over the course of his fifty-year career, traveled nearly 70,000 kilometers, much of it on foot.