432 Agenda

Please note two things: while the dates below suggests that this course follows a fixed, calendrical schedule, it is labeled an agenda for a good reason: sometimes discussions move more quickly or more slowly and schedules change. If you miss class, reach out to one of your fellow participants to ascertain where we are in the agenda.

In most cases, the direct link to an article or other kind of resource is posted below. In a number of instances, the direct link is to JSTOR, since that is where a number of folklore studies journals are archived. Please see the note on accessing materials for more information on successfully accessing databases and data repositories. For those materials not linked, they will be found in Teams: Files > readings.

Foundations

Aug 27. Introduction to the Course includes review of the syllabus, foundational lecture on folklore studies, and discussion of independent work.

Aug 29, Sep 3 & 5. No class meetings, but there is work. See below.

Aug 29. First, read Jakobson and Bogatyrev’s short essay and then consider artifacts and products in your own life: are they literary or folkloric? List at least five examples of each and determine if there is something more you can say about either the categories or the boundaries between the categories. That is your response should include two lists and then some synthesis. Due: Labor Day weekend.

Jakobson, Roman, and Petr Bogatyrev. 1971. On the Boundary Between Studies of Folklore and Literature. In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, 91–93. Edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Michigan Slavic Productions.

Sep 3. Read Bascom’s “Four Functions of Folklore.” Make sure you understand both contexts and functions. Apply Bascom’s heuristic to one item from your list from the previous assignment. Due by Friday, Sep 6.

Bascom, William. 1954. Four Functions of Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 67 (266): 333-349. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/536411.

Sep 5. Read O’Connor and Weatherall’s “Why We Trust Lies.” Neither of them are folklorists: what are their backgrounds and how do you think that affects their understanding of information, of learning, and of trust? Come to class on Tuesday, September 10 to synthesize this essay with the other things you have encountered in this course so far, including the first day’s lecture.

O’Connor, Cailin, and James Owen Weatherall. 2019. Why We Trust Lies: The Most Effective Misinformation Starts with Seeds of Truth. Scientific American September: 54-61.

Sep 10. Today’s discussion will focus on eliciting the important dimensions from what we read and synthesizing them into the larger conceptual framework which undergirds this course.

Sep 12. Read Burke’s “Literature as Equipment for Living.” In that essay, Burke argues, first, that proverbs aren’t simply things we say, but rather we do things with them. One of the things they do is name situations, giving us a way to deal with them. He then argues that other genres of discourse do something similar. Novels, for example, name situations. Following Burke, you could argue that pop songs name situations, or, as we might put it, “speak for us.” As you read Burke, find at least one situation that has multiple proverbs associated with it and list the proverbs, noting how the different proverbs offer different ways of understanding and treating the situation. As you read about the second section, list a novel and/or song(s) that speak for you. You might find that certain songs are associated with certain moments in your life. How and why did that happen?

Conduits & Cascades

Beyond the core concepts of folklore studies, there are some particular concepts, and terms, we need to include within our analytical toolkit in order to understand how online “communities” work. (The quotation marks indicate that we need to think about how we use terms: what it naturalizes and what it does not.)

Sep 17. Read Dégh and Vázsonyi’s essay on the “Multi-Conduit Transmission in Folklore.” Exercise: List the groups of which you are a part and then, using a network graph, try to chart the usual flow of information through those groups. What role do you play? Are you the bridge between groups or are there a number of people who overlap a group? How does that affect the flow of information.) Your assignment is to report on your findings and to submit a network graph of at least three groups of which you are a part. (Please just label everyone not you with their initials: we are not engaged in social graph surveillance in this course.)

Dégh, Linda, and Endre Vázsonyi. 1975. The Hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmission in Folklore. In Folklore. Performance and Communication, edited by Dan Ben-Amos, and Kenneth Goldstein, 207–55. Den Haag: Mouton.

Sep 19. Read Bikhchandani et al.

Bikhchandani, Sushil, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch. 1992. A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades. Journal of Political Economy 100 (5): 992-1026. 10.2307/2138632.

Sep 24. Read: Ellis. These days it seems we just go from one panic to another.

Ellis, Bill. 1989. “Death By Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder.” Western Folklore 48 (3): 201–20. DOI: 10.2307/1499739.

Sep 26. Read Laudun 2020.

Laudun, John. 2020. The Clown Legend Cascade of 2016. In Folklore and Social Media, edited by Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank, 188–208. University Press of Colorado. 10.2703/j.ctv19fvx6q.14.

Oct 1. Read Tangherlini et al.

Tangherlini, Timothy. 2017. Toward a Generative Model of Legend: Pizzas, Bridges, Vaccines, and Witches. Humanities 7 (1): 2017. 10.3390/h7010001.

Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press.

Everything below is not yet a part of the schedule.

Victor, Jeffrey. 1990. “Satanic Cult Rumors as Contemporary Legend.” Western Folklore 49 (1): 51–81. DOI: 10.2307/1499482.

Xiao, Q, W Huang, X Zhang, S Wan, and X Li. 2021. “Internet Rumors During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Dynamics of Topics and Public Psychologies.” Frontiers in Public Health 9: 788848. DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.788848.

DAY. Case Studies.

Ellis, Bill. 2015. What Bronies See When They Brohoof: Queering Animation on the Dark and Evil Internet. Journal of American Folklore 128/509: 298-314. muse.jhu.edu/article/589182.

Bock, Sheila. 2017. “Ku Klux Kasserole and Strange Fruit Pies: A Shouting Match at the Border in Cyberspace.” Journal of American Folklore 130 (516): 142-165. muse.jhu.edu/article/657563.

Klein, C, P Clutton, and AG Dunn. 2019. Pathways to Conspiracy: The Social and Linguistic Precursors of Involvement in Reddit’s Conspiracy Theory Forum. PLoS One 14 (11): e0225098.

DAY. More Case Studies.

Blank, Trevor. 2015. “Faux Your Entertainment: Amazon.com Product Reviews as a Locus of Digital Performance.” Journal of American Folklore 128 (509): 286–97. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.128.509.0286.

DAY. Mid-Term Assignment: research proposal that includes 100-200 words of proposal; 100-200 word description of data collected so far or plans for data collection; and 3-5 scientific/scholarly publications upon which you might draw for insight into your materials.

DAY. TBD. Both this week and next we will read materials that are drawn from convergences in your research projects. (Don’t worry: we will engage in an in-class activity that will help to determine what these are.)

DAY. See above.

DAY. Course Project 1. Basic corpus of materials due.

D’Ignazio, Catherine, & Klein, Lauren. 2020. The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves. In Data Feminism. Retrieved from https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/czq9dfs5.

DAY. Course Project 2. Annotated bibliography of scholarly sources due.

DAY. Course Project 3. Draft body paragraphs due.

DAY. Course Project 4. First draft of analytical essay due.

DAY. Course Project 5. Final draft of essay due.

Resources

A lot of collections of “American folklore” have been published over the years, each with its own assumptions about both “America” and “folklore” as well as what the purpose of such a collection should be. Typical of one kind of collection are those by Charles Skinner, whose Myths and Legends of Our Own Land reaches 9 volumes. A more synthetic, and more contemporary, reference can be found in the American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, edited by Jan Brunvand, a copy of which is available in the university library (Reference GR101.A54). While dated by contemporary scholarly perspectives, the collection of essays in Don Yoder’s American Folklife (GR105.A6) is still quite useful, and foundational in many ways.

In addition to reference works focused on the topic of American folklore, there are a myriad of other specialist reference works, many of which are available either in electronic formats or in the library for your use. Consider the following titles: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife, the Encyclopedia of Life Writing, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife are all the kinds of entry-level texts, being encyclopedias, that will be familiar to your freshman/sophomore self but will also get your junior/senior/graduate self on the road to more serious and substantial work. That is, in addition to a synthesis/summary of a topic from a particular perspective, most scholarly encyclopedias also offer a small number of suggested readings. Please follow through on those readings the way you would a link on a web page.

Possible Readings

Perceptive readers have, no doubt, noted to themselves that there appears to be a hole in the middle of the agenda/schedule/whatever: a whole series of class periods with no topic nor readering assigned. That gap is assignments is meant as an opening for the class, as a group, and me, as an instructor responding to the nature of that group, to decide where our interests lie. Online vernacular cultures cover a wide gamut of forms and the theory required to understand and analyze them is, if anything, even wider, including as it does work in anthropology, cognitive science, data science, folklore studies, information science, linguistics, and network science to name just a few of the fields active in this area (and naming them alphabetically at that).

What follows below is something of a list of the possible things we might read.

Online Folklore / Vernacular Expression

Fine, Gary Alan and Bill Ellis. 2010. The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736317.001.0001.

The chapter on conspiracy theories in Ellis and Fine 2010 seems almost precognizant of the current moment.

Peck, Andrew, and Trevor J. Blank, eds. 2020. Folklore and Social Media. University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv19fvx6q.

Peck and Blank 2020 is composed of 12 chapters, each of which is on a different topic in online vernacular culture. For those interested, two of those essays are computationally-driven, the one on “Bridges, Sex Slaves, Tweets, and Guns: A Multi-Domain Model of Conspiracy Theory” by Tim Tangherlini, Vwani Roychowdhury and Peter M. Broadwell and the one on “The Clown Legend Cascade of 2016” by yours truly. The chapter on “Overt and Covert Aspects of Virtual Play” by Bill Ellis pairs really well with a presentation by the at-the-time CEO of Cambridge Analytica.

Information

Shannon, Claud and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press.

Shannon and Weaver 1949 is the foundational mathematical treatment of information.

Gleick, James. 2011. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Vintage Books.

Networks

Golub, Benjamin, and Matthew Jackson. 2012. How Homophily Affects the Speed of Learning and Best-Response Dynamics. Quarterly Journal of Economics 127 (3): 1287–1338.

Ferguson, Niall. 2017. The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Penguin Books.

Ferguson is a bit out of his depth, and the book’s argument doesn’t really hold together – but, hey, when you’re Niall Ferguson, you don’t need cogent arguments any more – but the first few chapters are useful condensations, by a non-network scientist, of developments in network studies.

Cultural Analytics

Computational approaches to humanities topics and objects go by a number of different names for various historical, political, and weird reasons. The usual umbrella term is digital humanities, and if you are interested you might start there. Cultural analytics, sometimes also culture analytics (because feudalism is still rampant), is a subset of digital humanities focused on computational analyses, some of which seek to re-create conventional or traditional humanities studies but many of which seek to ask new kinds of questions. You may also find work with computational added in front of a well-established domain: e.g., computational folkloristics, computational literary studies, computational social sciences. In linguistics, a lot of this work has been pioneered within corpus linguistics and/or corpus stylistics – the latter is particularly worth exploring because a lot of interesting experiments have occurred under its aegis.

For those curious to survey what has been done and what is being done, there is no better place to start than with the journals:

Books

Traditional: Underwood, Jockers,

Online and pedagogical: https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/welcome.html