Highland Folk-Tale

Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale as a Grammar for Generation

The semi-formal analysis of Russian folk tales carried out by Vladimir Propp has often been used as theoretical background for the automated generation of stories. Its rigour and its exhaustive description of the constituent elements of Russian folk tales, and the enumeration of the patterns they follow, have acted as inspiration for several story generation systems, both sequential and interac...

Integration of Linguistic Markup into Semantic Models of Folk Narratives: The Fairy Tale Use Case

Propp’s influential structural analysis of fairy tales created a powerful schema for representing storylines in terms of character functions, which is straightforward to exploit in computational semantic analysis and procedural generation of stories of this genre. We tackle two resources that draw on the Proppian model – one formalizes it as a semantic markup scheme and the other as an ontology...

The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folk Tale Protagonists

Literary scholars and psychologists have long remarked striking similarities in the depiction of male heroes in the world's folk tale traditions. The best-known attempt to document and explain these similarities is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1936). Campbell's work differs in detail from other prominent attempts to define universal features of heroes, however its grand the...

‘Folk psychology’ is not folk psychology

This paper disputes the claim that our understanding of others is enabled by a commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology, whose ‘core’ involves the attribution of intentional states in order to predict and explain behaviour. I argue that interpersonal understanding is seldom, if ever, a matter of two people assigning intentional states to each other but emerges out of a context of interaction between th...

Digital Necrosis: A Hoarder’s Tale