Who are the Folk? Folklore in an Algorithmic Age
Date 3 February 2027 19:00 - 20:30
Location Online talk
Speaker Ceri Houlbrook, Anna Milon, Will Lamb, A F Wilson and Andrew Wedgebury
Folklore has always changed as the ways that people communicate, gather and transmit their culture have changed.
Digital technologies, however, raise a more fundamental question: What happens then the technologies through which we transmit folklore, themselves, begin to influence what is transmitted, repeated, altered and forgotten?
Since the emergence of the digital commons, their inclusion of folklore was moot, both in the digitisation of previously analogue folk outputs and in the creation of new digital folklore online. The folkloric, the magical, and the occult have become both a frame through which we understand new digital technologies and an inspiration for those technologies and their outputs. At the dawn of the internet, Erik Davis explored the appeal of drawing on magical and spiritual formuli to navigate this new digital space. Three decades later, Shira Chess cautions that ‘we are rapidly becoming untethered from a stable understanding of reality, seeing it increasingly in technomagical terms.’
This event brings together four researchers working at the juncture of folklore and digital technologies, including algorithmic systems, to share their work and consider what these developments might mean for our understanding of folklore itself.
Questions include:
- What new affordances and risks does digital space create for folklore, and what might be lost, as well as gained, when folklore moves between analogue and digital spaces?
- What can our use of technomagical terms like ‘digital demons’ (Chess) and ‘algorithmic alchemy’ (Zhang et al) to explain emergent technologies tell us about our current anxieties and desires?
- Where does analogue folklore, such as oral storytelling and calendar customs, meet digital folklore, such as memes? What new definitions of folklore might meaningfully encompass both, particularly when cultural forms increasingly drift between digital and physical spaces?
- What happens when digital technologies do more than transmit folklore? If platforms and algorithmic systems influence what is encountered, repeated, transformed or forgotten, how should folklorists understand their place in a process traditionally associated with cultural transmission?
- Who are the folk: in exploring this perennial question, are we drawing lines based on the adoption or acceptance of certain technologies, and what happens to that category when platforms and algorithmic systems increasingly mediate the exchanges between people? Can a posthuman folklore emerge from these entanglements?
Rather than treating the analogue and digital as opposing categories, the discussion will consider folklore as something increasingly moving between people, communities, technologies and spaces, attempting to find out if established ideas of transmission, participation and ‘the folk’ remain sufficient for understanding these movements.
Dr Ceri Houlbrook is a co-investigator and Dr Anna Milon is a research associate on Project StoryMachine, and interdisciplinary research project that investigates the affordances of spatial hypertext and recommender systems for the study of folklore. Prof Will Lamb is a co-investigator on the ‘Unlocking AI for the Languages in Britain and Ireland’ project at the University of Edinburgh. Dr A F Wilson is a senior lecturer in criminology and sociology at the University of Derby, researching the role of folklore in social movements. Dr Andrew Wedgbury is a lecturer in game design and game developer at the University of Staffordshire, he works on capturing a sense of haunting in digital games.
Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code–log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/who-are-the-folk-folklore-in-an-algorithmic-age-tickets-2003815908323
Every ticket sold supports the work of The Folklore Society
Image credit: Rapha Wilde on Unsplash (A person with long hair playing a guitar - Free Photo on Unsplash)