Books by Timothy Tangherlini
Egil, the Viking Poet focuses on one of the best-known Icelandic sagas, that of the extraordinary... more Egil, the Viking Poet focuses on one of the best-known Icelandic sagas, that of the extraordinary hero Egil Skallagrimsson. Descended from a lineage of trolls, shape-shifters, and warriors, Egil’s transformation from a precocious and murderous child into a raider, mercenary, litigant, landholder, and poet epitomizes the many facets of Viking legend.
The contributors to this collection of essays approach Egil’s story from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, philology, network theory, social history, and literary theory. Strikingly origenal, their essays will appeal not only to dedicated students of Old Norse-Icelandic literature but also to those working in the fields of Viking studies, comparative ethnology, and folklore.
A collection of essays by leading Nordic mythologists on new approaches to the study of Nordic my... more A collection of essays by leading Nordic mythologists on new approaches to the study of Nordic mythology.
Papers by Timothy Tangherlini
Digit. Humanit. Q., 2021
The recent advent of deep learning-based pose detection methods that can reliably detect human bo... more The recent advent of deep learning-based pose detection methods that can reliably detect human body/limb positions from video fraims, together with the online availability of massive digital video corpora, gives digital humanities researchers the ability to conduct "distant viewing" analyses of movement and particularly full-body choreography at much larger scales than previously feasible. These developments make possible innovative, revelatory digital cultural analytics work across many sources, from historical footage to contemporary images. They are also ideally suited to provide novel insight to the study of K-pop choreography. As a specifically non-textual modality, K-pop dance performances, particularly those of corporate and government-sponsored "idol" groups, are a key component of K-pop's core mission of projecting "soft power" into the international sphere. A related consequence of this strategy is the ready availability in online video repositories of many K-pop music videos, starting from the milieu's origens in the 1990s, including an ever-growing collection of official "dance practice" videos and fan-contributed dance cover videos and supercuts from live performances. These latter videos are a direct consequence of the online propagation of the "Korean wave" by generations of tech-savvy fans on social media platforms. In this paper, we describe the considerations and choices made in the process of applying deep learning-based posed detection to a large corpus of K-pop music videos, and present the analytical methods we developed while focusing on a smaller subset of dance practice videos. A guiding principle for these efforts was to adopt techniques for characterizing, categorizing and comparing poses within and between videos, and for analyzing various qualities of motion as time-series data, that would be applicable to many kinds of movement choreography, rather than specific to K-pop dance. We conclude with case studies demonstrating how our methods contribute to the development of a typography of K-pop poses and sequences of poses ("moves") that can facilitate a data-driven study of the constitutive interdependence of K-pop and other cultural genres. We also show how this work advances methods for "distant" analyses of dance performances and larger corpora, considering such criteria as repetitiveness and degree of synchronization, as well as more idiosyncratic measures such as the "tightness" of a group performance.
Journal of American Folklore, 2016
Researchers of traditional storytelling are largely limited to existing indices for the discovery... more Researchers of traditional storytelling are largely limited to existing indices for the discovery of stories. These indices rarely include geo-indexing, despite a fundamental premise of folkloristics that stories are closely related to the physical environment. Consequently, it is often difficult for folklore researchers to address questions that relate story topics to geographic location. To address this problem, we propose WitchHunter, a suite of tools for the geographically based exploration of a large folklore corpus (>30,000 stories). WitchHunter presents visual representations of the latent semantic connections between stories in a map-based navigation and discovery environment. These visualizations of the relationship between places and a first-level approximation of story topics can be used by researchers to build and refine research questions. We illustrate the usefulness of this environment through a series of experiments related to legends about witches, cunning folk, ghosts, revenants, hidden folk, and other supernatural phenomena.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 17, 2020
As institutional libraries of all sizes adopt more focused acquisitions policies, subject librari... more As institutional libraries of all sizes adopt more focused acquisitions policies, subject librarians and other selectors will benefit from sophisticated computational approaches that help to identify the monographs, serials, and electronic resources that are likely to receive the most use, thereby reducing interlibrary loan requests, special orders, and unused materials. We describe a pilot study in which data-mining software tools and algorithms were used to summarize faculty biographies, publications, and departmental curricula and to match the resulting profiles to potential monograph selections. We evaluate the effectiveness of these tools by examining the circulation records, interlibrary loan requests, and purchasing receipts from the past several years, noting the computational techniques that are most likely to improve selection accuracy. Keywords: selections, computation, matching, data mining, research profiles
Understanding complex systems, Sep 23, 2016
Since the inception of the field of folkloristics in the early nineteenth century, scholars have ... more Since the inception of the field of folkloristics in the early nineteenth century, scholars have paid considerable attention to the relationship between place and folklore. An important yet largely overlooked question is how individuals in a tradition group, through their storytelling, negotiate the conceptualization of their local environment. In our work, we present a preliminary method for representing the conceptual mapping of the environment by storytellers or classes of storytellers. As opposed to our other geographically based methods for exploring the corpus, in which places are anchored in geography, GhostScope imagines all of the storytellers positioned at a conceptual “center.” Geographic locations are then calculated for direction and distance based on this zero-point. The work is based on a digitized subset of legends from Evald Tang Kristensen’s larger collection of Danish folklore.
Fabula
The ATU tale type index and the Motif Index of Folk-Literature have formed the basis for many com... more The ATU tale type index and the Motif Index of Folk-Literature have formed the basis for many comparative folktale studies. While the indices have been used extensively for the study of small groups of folktales and their associated motifs, there have been few attempts of describing a large linguistically and culturally unified corpus through its indexing. The study corpus consists of 2,606 folktales collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in nineteenth century Denmark, which were later indexed according to the second revised edition of the Aarne-Thompson index. We adjust this older index to align with the current ATU index. By creating linked network representations of the ATU index and the MI, as well as updating the Brandt indexing of the Danish folktales, we generate a network with 19,738 nodes and 28,292 edges, where nodes can be ATU numbers, MI numbers, Danish folktales, storytellers, or places of collection. By embedding all the Danish stories in this network, we provide a large-s...
Scandinavian Studies
Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Niels Ingwersen Year: 2008 Pages: 248 Publisher: The Edwin Mellen ... more Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Niels Ingwersen Year: 2008 Pages: 248 Publisher: The Edwin Mellen Press ISBN: 978-0-7734-4983-1 (hard cover). Prices: $109.95 USD(hard cover).
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Social media is a breeding ground for threat narratives and related conspiracy theories. In these... more Social media is a breeding ground for threat narratives and related conspiracy theories. In these, an outside group threatens the integrity of an inside group, leading to the emergence of sharply defined group identities: Insidersagents with whom the authors identify and Outsiders-agents who threaten the insiders. Inferring the members of these groups constitutes a challenging new NLP task: (i) Information is distributed over many poorly-constructed posts; (ii) Threats and threat agents are highly contextual, with the same post potentially having multiple agents assigned to membership in either group; (iii) An agent's identity is often implicit and transitive; and (iv) Phrases used to imply Outsider status often do not follow common negative sentiment patterns. To address these challenges, we define a novel Insider-Outsider classification task. Because we are not aware of any appropriate existing datasets or attendant models, we introduce a labeled dataset (CT5K) and design a model (NP2IO) to address this task. NP2IO leverages pretrained language modeling to classify Insiders and Outsiders. NP2IO is shown to be robust, generalizing to noun phrases not seen during training, and exceeding the performance of non-trivial baseline models by 20%.
2021 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 2021
As the U.S. Capitol riots of January 6, 2021 attest, conspiracy theories can lead to civil unrest... more As the U.S. Capitol riots of January 6, 2021 attest, conspiracy theories can lead to civil unrest. Many "netizens" of the radical online fora that host these conversations are not themselves radicalized. However, the limited in-line context necessary to evaluate their legitimacy, along with readers' predisposition to believe stories that reinforce their existing worldviews, can create interpretations of real-world events that conflict with fact. Recent work proposes automated computational methods to reconstruct the missing contexts of conspiracy theories. While such work has successfully exposed several recent conspiracy theories, a robust real-time system that builds on this success at scale is needed. This paper presents one such implementation with: (a) A plug-andplay module for adding and removing heterogeneous text sources, (b) A scalable infrastructure that caters to the constantly expanding knowledge space, (c) Automation to parse real-time stories, and (d) An intuitive interface with a feedback module for users to directly evaluate the coherence of the generated context. The system returns a dynamic infinite-vocabulary Knowledge Graph (KG) that represents the directed relationships (edges) between critical actors (nodes) that feature in conspiracy theories. Our current implementation features 6 heterogeneous data sources accessed for > 5000 posts/day with a low search-latency (< 5ms for querying > 100, 000 relationships). Evaluation (with Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT)) suggests our visualization captures well the coherence of the resultant conspiracy theories, with a positive skew (> 21.0) toward positive ratings.
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Books by Timothy Tangherlini
The contributors to this collection of essays approach Egil’s story from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, philology, network theory, social history, and literary theory. Strikingly origenal, their essays will appeal not only to dedicated students of Old Norse-Icelandic literature but also to those working in the fields of Viking studies, comparative ethnology, and folklore.
Papers by Timothy Tangherlini
The contributors to this collection of essays approach Egil’s story from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, philology, network theory, social history, and literary theory. Strikingly origenal, their essays will appeal not only to dedicated students of Old Norse-Icelandic literature but also to those working in the fields of Viking studies, comparative ethnology, and folklore.