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ISEBEL is an online database for belief legends. The acronym stands for: Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends. The database contains more than 70,000 traditional legends in Dutch, Frisian, Danish and German, while another 6,000 Icelandic legends are currently being added. The initiative for this project was taken several years ago by the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, the University of Rostock/the Wossidlo Research Center and UCLA/UC Berkeley. The ambition is to create a European database, with an intelligent search function and geographical visualizations. What makes the search engine 'intelligent' is that it can always be searched in English, thanks to high-quality automatic translations in the background. The legend material that is brought together can also form the basis of sophisticated graphs that network themes, motifs, narrators, repertoires, and places. This article includes examples of international legends about mermaids and werewolves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1989, Willem Kuiper published his thesis on the Middle Dutch romance Ferguut in which he concluded that the text was written by two authors. Kuiper showed differences in writing style at all levels and concluded this could not be a coincidence. According to Kuiper, the first author translated the Old French Fergus by Guillaume le Clerc, approximately until vs. 2592, whereafter the second author completed the second half without the French example - in the spirit of Fergus, but in his own words. Whereas Kuiper had to do his quantitative style analysis by hand, today the statistical programming language R in collaboration with the stylometric program Stylo can perform the job much faster and more thoroughly. In its analysis, the software not only takes all the differences into account (like Kuiper did), but all the similarities as well, even at levels writers and readers are hardly aware of, such as word frequency, word order and the use of function words. At this level every author leaves behind his personal fingerprint. Our stylometric research on the one hand confirmed that differences in style can be detected, but on the other hand shows how the even larger number of similarities suggests that the entire text was written by single author. The difference in style should most probably be explained as a shift in register by one author, from translating a foreign language text to freely retelling a story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There was one trending topic on Twitter in December 2012 that we could have seen coming for a few years now: the New Age prophecy of the End of Times on 21 December 2012'all because some Mayan calendar supposedly ended on this date. For 2 weeks long'a week before the Apocalypse and a week after'we monitored Twitter for Dutch words concerning the End of the World. We caught 52,000 tweets in 2 weeks. When did the stream of rumours peek? How many retweets were involved? Was there much micro-variation? What was the overall content of the tweets? What emotions were expressed in the tweets? How did religious people respond? And finally, how many people confessed they were truly scared because of the prophecy? These are intriguing questions that we can answer by using a few basic computational tools. Although the Apocalypse got a lot of attention in the news media, it turned out most Dutch people on Twitter took the End of Days with a grain of salt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development of the Dutch Folktale Database as a digital archive of intangible heritage and a sophisticated research instrument. Current research focuses on automating the assignment of metadata to folktales and on obtaining a better understanding of classifications of folktales into types, as well as an understanding of motif sequences. These studies are useful for future fundamental research into patterns and structures, such as historical and geographical variation in oral tradition, on an international scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on a conference on the digitization of cultural archives and their presentation as online digital libraries, held in Rostock, Germany, from September 26-28, 2012. Topics of discussion included open access to such collections, metadata management, and the use of Web 2.0 ideas such as crowdsourcing in the maintenance and further development of ethnographic websites.

Inspired by The Lore of the Land, published by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson in 2005, a Dutch version of this book, comprising local and regional legends, was published in the Netherlands in 2010 by Willem de Blecourt, Ruben Koman, Jurjen van der Kooi, and Theo Meder. The editors selected over three hundred and fifty legends, representative of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, for the volume. Some were real ecotypes, having been appropriated by local communities and having led to the erection of associated statues, often for touristic and commercial purposes, as well as for shaping collective identities, while others were almost forgotten tales. The editors also found, somewhat unexpectedly, that quite a number of popular legends had been composed and constructed by romantic writers in the nineteenth century, and that these older legends were much more popular than the recently-invented ones. As the editors also included a number of contemporary legends, they discovered that one such legend had already become popular enough to have a statue erected and a song composed in its honour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary legend and rumour, fact and fiction often mingle. Modern legends and ostensive action can have a tremendous impact on the perception of reality and they can form a barometer for the social climate. For ethnologists and folklorists, the perception of truth should be more vital than truth itself. The question is why certain legends are believed to be true. This article explores that question through material collected from the Netherlands that portrays immigrants and Muslims as dangerous "Others." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the New Age phenomena is the cult that believes that crop circles (mainly) have an extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, and that the formations contain messages from beyond or above. One of the effective tools for initiation, persuasion and conversion is storytelling. More than contemporary legends the stories about crop circles look like traditional exempla, illustrating a spiritual (and most of the time positive) truth. The narratives can provide building blocks for an entire cosmology, ranging from human creation by godlike aliens to apocalyptic times in the near future. The accumulation of stories can determine people's perception and behaviour in daily life, and eventually lead to the belief in secret conspiracies to keep the general public ignorant about the truth. Un des phnomnes du New Age est le culte qui croit que les cercles de bl sont principalement d'origine surnaturelle ou extraterrestre et que ces formations contiennent des messages de l'au-del ou de l'espace. L'un des outils efficaces pour l'initiation, la persuasion et la conversion est de conter des histoires. Plus que les lgendes contemporaines, les histoires sur les cercles de bl ressemblent aux exempla traditionnels qui illustrent une vrit spirituelle (et gnralement positive). Les narrations peuvent fournir des lments constitutifs pour toute une cosmologie qui s'tend de la cration humaine par des extraterrestres semblables aux dieux jusqu'aux vnements apocalyptiques prdits pour un proche avenir. L'accumulation des contes pourrait influencer la perception et le comportement des gens dans la vie quotidienne et finalement, elle pourrait contribuer l'ide de complots secrets servant maintenir le peuple ignorant de la vrit. Zu den New Age-Phnomenen gehrt ein Kult, demzufolge Kornkreise (hauptschlich) bernatrlicher oder auerirdischer Herkunft sind und Botschaften aus dem Jenseits oder dem Weltraum enthalten. Das Erzhlen von Geschichten bildet dabei ein effektives Werkzeug zu Initiation, berzeugungsarbeit und Bekehrung. Mehr noch als zeitgenssische Sagen hneln die Erzhlungen ber Kornkreise traditionellen Exempeln, die zur Illustration einer spirituellen (und meistens auch positiven) Wahrheit dienen. Die Erzhlungen knnen Bausteine zu einer ganzen Kosmologie liefern, von der Schpfung der Menschheit durch gttergleiche Auerirdische bis hin zu apokalyptischen Ereignissen, die fr die nahe Zukunft vorausgesagt werden. Die Akkumulation von Erzhlungen kann die Wahrnehmung und das Verhalten der Menschen im Alltagsleben beeinflussen und nicht zuletzt zur Vorstellung von heimlichen Verschwrungen beitragen, deren Zweck es ist, den Menschen die Wahrheit vorzuenthalten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of Fabula is filled with six papers presented at a Meertens Institute symposium in Amsterdam, on February 25, 2005. The subject of the conference and the title of this theme issue are alike: Narratives, Roles and Beliefs in the New Age Era: Homo narrans Homo ludens Homo religiosus. The focal point lays on contemporary narrative culture and modern folk narrative that in one way or another can be connected to New Age spirituality. For our own convenience, let us consider New Age to be a collective name for all kinds of alternative spirituality, or even for popular religion, as an escape from modern technological and rigid scientific reasoning as well as an alternative for traditional Christianity. A form of spirituality that contributes to the re-enchantment of the world and to recovery of let us say the meaning of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than fifty years after the first edition of Thompson's seminalMotif-Indexof Folk Literature, we present an online search engine tailored to fully disclose the index digitally. This search engine, called MOMFER, greatly enhances the searchability of theMotif-Indexand provides exciting new ways to explore the collection. This is enabled by our use of modern techniques from both natural language processing and information retrieval. The key feature of the search tool is the way in which it allows users to search theMotif-Indexfor semantic concepts, such as ‘mythical animals’, ‘mortality’, or ‘emotions’. This paper will explain the motivations for creating the search tool, explicate the production process, and show in a number of case studies how the search tool can be used to explore the index in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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