From Folklore Collections to Digital Research Infrastructures: Expanding Access, Engagement, and Analysis

Since the early 20th century, folklore archives have served as fundamental research infrastructures – systematically documenting oral traditions, narratives, and cultural expressions. Built through long-term collection efforts – often with public participation – these archives have been instrumental in the development of folklore studies, ethnology, and related disciplines. Despite evolving in response to disciplinary, methodological and institutional transformations, folklore archives remain vital and living repositories of cultural heritage, while the advent of digital technologies has profoundly expanded access, enhanced research potential, and reshaped their workflows and functions. Over the past decade, large-scale digitization advancements have given rise to multifaceted digital platforms such as dúchas.ie (Ireland), Folke (Sweden) sok.folke.isof.se, garamantas.lv (Latvia), samla.no (Norway), sagnagrunnur.arnastofnun.is (Iceland), Danish Folklore Nexus scando.ist.berkeley.edu, Dutch Legend Database (Netherlands) verhalenbank.nl, kivike.kirmus.ee (Estonia), and tautosakos-rankrastynas.lt (Lithuania) exemplify this shift – providing structured access to historical and contemporary folklore materials. Collaborative projects strengthen interoperability across linguistic and national boundaries. The ISEBEL project[3], an intelligent cross-collection search engine for belief legends, and FILTER [1], a research environment for analyzing poetic text variation, are pioneering initiatives enabling comparative folklore research across linguistic and national boundaries. A defining feature of digital folklore archives is the integration of citizen science and crowdsourcing, enhancing accessibility while keeping folklore collections dynamic. Volunteers are involved in manuscript transcription, increasingly aided by AI-powered HTR tools, as seen in Ireland duchas.ie/en/meitheal, Latvia lfk100.garamantas.lv, and Sweden sok.folke.isof.se. Other platforms, such as minner.no (Norway) minner.no and kratt.folklore.ee (Estonia) kratt.folklore.ee, facilitate knowledge exchange. Some initiatives support artistic reinterpretation of archival content, such as “Sing with the Archives” (Latvia) dziedi.garamantas.lv and Lithuania’s “To Remember Me By” project. A key advantage of folklore digitization is the ability to extract large-scale datasets, unlocking new possibilities for computational folkloristics. These datasets reveal structural patterns, narrative evolution, and cross-cultural connections while offering deeper insights into how folklore collections were formed and curated. E.g., FILTER project [1] exemplifies this potential by applying computational methods to extensive Finnish-Estonian folksong corpora, while the ISEBEL project [3] demonstrates how to enhance comparative folklore research through automated translations and metadata-driven analyses. The use of large language models in Scottish Gaelic storytelling [2] demonstrates how synthetic text generation can expand training data for speech recognition, further supporting low-resource language technologies and computational folklore studies. This poster presents the development of digital folklore archives as emerging digital research infrastructures – emphasizing the critical need for cross-border and multilingual integration. Emerging large language models further accelerate this shift – enabling automated processing and translation of diverse folklore corpora, including under-resourced and endangered languages. These innovations enhance usability, support archival curation and public engagement, offering new opportunities for research and international collaboration. References [1] Janicki, M. et al.(2024). Developing a Digital Research Environment for Finnic Oral Poetry. BJMC, 12(4),535–547. https://doi.org/10.22364/bjmc.2024.12.4.15 [2] Lamb, W. et al.(2025) Synthesising a corpus of Gaelic traditional narrative with cross-lingual text expansion. Celtic Language Technology Conference 5,12–26. ACL Anthology.https://aclanthology.org/2025.cltw-1.2.pdf [3] Meder, T. et al.(2023). The ISEBEL Project: Collecting international narrative heritage in a multilingual search engine. Fabula 64,1–2. https://doi.org/10.1515/fabula-2023-0006