In Search of Cinderella: A Transaction Log Analysis of Folktale Searchers

In this work we report on a transaction log analysis of the Dutch Folktale Database, an online repository of extensively annotated folktales ranging from old fairy tales to recent urban legends, written in (old) Dutch, Frisian and a variety of Dutch dialects. We observed that users have a preference for subgenres within folktales such as traditional legends and urban legends and prefer stories in standard Dutch over stories in Frisian. Searches are typically short and aim at large groups of stories (from the same subgenre or collector), or specific stories with the same main character. In contrast, search sessions are relatively long (median of around 2 minutes) and many result pages are viewed (average: 3.4 pages, median: 2 pages). Based on the observations we propose a number of improvements to the current search and browsing interface. Our findings offer insight into the search behavior of folktale searchers, but are also of interest to researchers and developers working on other e-humanities collections.