Publikation
Propp Revisited: Integration of Linguistic Markup into Structured Content Descriptors of Tales
Piroska Lendvai; Thierry Declerck; Sándor Darányi; Scott Malec
In: Digital Humanities 2010. Digital Humanities - Annual International Conference for Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DH-10), July 7-10, London, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 7/2010.
Zusammenfassung
Metadata that serve as semantic markup, such as conceptual categories that describe the macrostructure
of a plot in terms of actors and their mutual relationships, actions, and their ingredients
annotated in folk narratives, are important additional resources of digital humanities research.
Traditionally originating in structural analysis, in fairy tales, they are called functions (Propp,
1968), whereas in myths - mythemes (Levi-Strauss, 1955); a related, overarching type of content
metadata is a folklore motif (Uther, 2004; Jason, 2000).
In his influential study, Propp treated a corpus of tales in Afanasevs collection (Afanasev,
1945), establishing basic recurrent units of the plot (functions), such as Villainy, Liquidation of
misfortune, Reward, or Test of Hero, and the combinations and sequences of elements employed
to arrange them into moves1. His aim was to describe the DNA-like structure of the magic tale
sub-genre as a novel way to provide comparisons. As a start along the way to developing a
story grammar, the Proppian model is relatively straightforward to formalize for computational
semantic annotation, analysis, and generation of fairy tales. Our study describes an effort towards
creating a comprehensive XML markup of fairly tales following Propp's functions, by an
approach that integrates functional text annotation with grammatical markup in order to be used
across text types, genres and languages.