The ISEBEL Project: Collecting International Narrative Heritage in a Multilingual Search Engine.

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]