Ukrainian Traditional Folklore

SEARCHABLE SOUND FILES

Verbal culture is the study of words. Folklore began with the study of words, or what is also called oral literature. Folklorists first became interested in texts of substantial size, such as epic poems and long magical folktales. The field has grown and now, in addition to epics and tales, folklorists study songs and stories of all kinds and smaller genres such as proverbs, riddles, incantations and charms.

For many years folklorists have been able to record this wonderful information but there has always been the problem of presenting this information to fellow scholars and the general public. The standard approach has been to transcribe these recordings into written texts. This procedure is not only very labor intensive, but these transcriptions lose the nuances of language and the "performance" aspect of the interview.

Since 1998 Natalie Kononenko has been interviewing people in the villages of Central Ukraine for her research. These recordings have been available to very few people and it has been impossible to indicate where, in these 150 hours of recordings, the villagers discuss different aspects of their cultural life. At the University of Alberta she had available the expertise of the staff of TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and a graduate student Svitlana Kukharenko. Ms. Kukharenko listened to the recordings and she noted at which time on each recording a specific topic was discussed. This information was then incorporated by Peter Holloway into a web page built by Yue (Eric) Zhang of TAPoR.

To hear the results CLICK ON: http://projects.tapor.ualberta.ca/UkraineAudio/