Digital Folkloristics

Author(s): Jeffrey A. Tolbert and Eric D. M. Johnson

Source: Western Folklore , Fall 2019, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Fall 2019), pp. 327-356
Published by: Western States Folklore Society

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Digital Folkloristics
Text, Ethnography, and
Interdisciplinarity
Jeffrey A. Tolbert and Eric D. M. Johnson

ABSTRACT
This paper argues for a digital folkloristics that combines the
textual/quantitative approaches characteristic of the digital
humanities (DH) with the field-based methods composing digital
ethnography. It also outlines a broad category of digitally-enabled
and digitally-focused scholarly work that is inclusive and in
dialogue with many disciplines and acknowledges both the textual
and ethnographic dimensions of folkloristic work. KEYWORDS:
digital scholarship; digital ethnography; digital humanities; digital
methodology; interdisciplinarity

Digital scholarship—henceforth DS, because this is the age of

acronyms—is notoriously nebulous. The term may ultimately
be an unnecessary repackaging of work scholars in all disci-
plines have been doing all along, activities which are imagined
as somehow different in the digital age despite no one being

Jeffrey A. Tolbert is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore,

Penn State Harrisburg. Eric D.M. Johnson is Head of Innovative Media at
VCU Libraries, Virginia Commonwealth University.
Western Folklore 78.4 (Fall 2019): 327-356. Copyright © 2019. Western States Folklore Society

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328 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

able to identify any really substantive differences besides the

new technologies themselves (cf. Weller 2011:3, 14–28). Re-
gardless of its connotations, DS is unquestionably now a thing,
attested to by the existence of digital scholarship centers and
programs in many colleges and universities, and the large and
growing body of literature that aligns itself with one or another
digital approach; and as a thing it demands attention.
For folklorists the category of digital scholarship is espe-
cially significant, representing a significant opportunity both for
combining disparate approaches within the discipline, and for
engaging in meaningful ways with scholarship in other fields.
Unfortunately, although folklorists have produced a consider-
able amount of work that can be broadly termed digital, they
have seldom availed themselves of these opportunities. This
paper argues that a digital approach to folkloristics needs to
be as methodologically and theoretically open as possible, re-
specting disciplinary traditions while also engaging with the
considerable volume of digital scholarship that our colleagues
in other fields have already undertaken. In exploring existing
forms of digital scholarship—and attempting to locate digital
folkloristics within DS—it outlines a broad category of digital-
ly-enabled and digitally-focused scholarly work that is inclu-
sive of folkloristics’ own diversity of approaches and simulta-
neously in dialogue with allied disciplines.
This is no call for folklorists to attend to the digital: such
calls have been made, repeatedly, over the last two decades and
more (e.g., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996; Blank 2009, 2012).
Neither is this a comprehensive bibliography of digital schol-
arship literature. Rather, our aim is to broadly trace the con-
tours of emerging (and in some cases, well-established) dis-
courses surrounding digital scholarship in allied disciplines. In
so doing we hope also to highlight the differential invocations
of “the digital,” both inside and outside of folkloristics, which
may refer on the one hand to computational approaches and on
the other to qualitative studies of “the digital” in the abstract.
Inside the discipline, the invocation of digital folkloristics as

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 329

a shorthand for computer-assisted analysis of folkloric texts—

or even conventional close readings of texts which happen to
originate and/or circulate in digital contexts—risks obscuring
the ethnographic dimension of much contemporary folkloris-
tic research on digital aspects of vernacular life. The emerging
sub-field of digital folkloristics needs to make explicit concep-
tual and methodological space for both textually-focused study
and digital ethnography, a set of methodologies that, like “con-
ventional” ethnography, seek to understand (digital) cultures
holistically, not as a collection of discrete texts but as a network
of interrelationships between texts, contexts, groups, identities,
and social processes.
Neither is this an attempt to narrow the (sub-)field of digital
folkloristics or to police its boundaries. Instead we aim to call
attention to the different approaches already included within
contemporary digital scholarship as a whole and point out areas
of convergence between extra-disciplinary DS and the work of
contemporary folklorists. The goal is to ensure that digital folk-
loristics, if it does in fact coalesce into a sub-field or methodol-
ogy—and we suggest it can and, for now at least, should—be un-
derstood to include more than one type of digital work. Far from
narrowing the field, a digital folkloristics that honors the disci-
pline’s own diverse methodological and theoretical concerns and
remains conversant with allied disciplines will have the effect of
opening new areas for folkloristic exploration and collaboration.
Forms of digital scholarship and their implications for
folkloristics
A 2006 report commissioned by the American Council of
Learned Societies offers the following framework for under-
standing digital scholarship:

In recent practice, “digital scholarship” has meant several

related things:
A. Building a digital collection of information for fur-
ther study and analysis
B. Creating appropriate tools for collection-building

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330 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

C. Creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study

of collections
D. Using digital collections and analytical tools to gen-
erate new intellectual products
E. Creating authoring tools for these new intellectual
products, either in traditional forms or in digital
form. (Courant et al. 2006:7)

The authors of the report specify letter D as the “core meaning

and ultimate objective of ‘digital scholarship’” (7), though they
emphasize that collection-and tool-building, as opposed to tool
use, are also important.1
Much has happened, of course, in the years since the ACLS
report was released. But its emphasis on tools and collections
suggest a corpus-focused, analytical orientation that does not
necessarily reflect the concerns or methodologies of all disci-
plines, nor exhaust the possibilities of digital scholarship. By
emphasizing corpuses and tool-building as the “core” of DS,
this model inadvertently excludes other digital possibilities.
Edward L. Ayers offers a somewhat more useful definition:
“Although the phrase sometimes refers to issues surrounding
copyright and open access and sometimes to scholarship analyz-
ing the online world, digital scholarship—emanating, perhaps,
from digital humanities—most frequently describes discipline-
based scholarship produced with digital tools and presented in
digital form” (2013:27; see also Rockwell 2011:153). Ayers
cuts to the chase: digital scholarship, as the term is typically
used, is scholarship done digitally. (He also usefully under-
scores the often-overlooked point that scholarship and humani-
ties are different words indicating different things.)
But, as is always the case, things are more complicated
than they appear. It should be acknowledged, for instance,
that there is some doubt as to whether digital is actually a nec-
essary descriptor. As Clifford Lynch, executive director of the
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), writes, “Digital
scholarship is an incredibly awkward term that people have

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 331

come up with to describe a complex group of developments.

The phrase is really, at some basic level, nonsensical. After
all, scholarship is scholarship. Doing science is doing science.
We don’t find the Department of Digital Physics arguing with
the Department of Non-Digital Physics about who’s doing
‘real’ physics” (Lynch 2014:11).
Lynch’s point is well taken. Further, if scholars all use digi-
tal tools, then all scholarship is digital, and so the distinction is
meaningless (Martin 2016:3). And new technologies are con-
stantly emerging and have been adopted by scholars throughout
history without lending their names to the scholarly enterprise.
Pearce et al. make a related argument: “Digital scholarship can
only have meaning if it marks a radical break in scholarship
practices brought about through the possibilities enabled in
new technologies. This break would encompass a more open
form of scholarship” (Pearce et al. 2010).2 DS only matters, in
other words, if it is somehow distinct from, or a clearly-de-
lineated subcategory of, scholarship more generally. (We di-
verge slightly from Pearce and colleagues in suggesting that the
“break” implied by DS need not be a radical one.)
As touched on above, a further point of confusion aris-
es from the dual significances of the “digital” in DS itself.
The first emphasizes “the digital” as part of the practice of
scholarship: bringing digital tools and approaches to bear on
scholarly questions, and generating digital forms of output,
regardless of the subject of inquiry. These digital approaches
might include computer-driven textual analysis, databases,
web-based or multimedia presentations, or complex image
analysis. The second emphasizes “the digital” as the object
of scholarly inquiry itself (which includes studies of cultures
of the digital, or the digital in culture). Sociological analy-
sis of online gamers, the history of “humanities computing”
(as digital humanities was previously known—see Vanhoutte
2013), and rhetorical practices in computer coding are all ex-
amples of scholarship focusing on digital technologies, envi-
ronments, cultures, and cultural practices. Perhaps it is useful

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332 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

to term these “digitally-enabled scholarship” and “scholar-

ship of the digital,” respectively. Of course, to add to the con-
fusion, the former might be brought to bear on the latter in
what might be (awkwardly) termed “digitally-enabled schol-
arship of the digital.”
It may well be that digital scholarship and related terms—
including digital folkloristics—are simply “terms of transition,”
as Johnson recently suggested in a conference panel (2017),
existing only while given disciplines differentially support
scholars who rely on digital tools and digital forms and those
who choose not to. But at present the digital qualifier remains
an important one, invoked in specific contexts toward specific
ends, forming the basis for the creation of new programs and
centers, courses like Tolbert’s recent “Digital Tools in the Hu-
manities” at Penn State Harrisburg, and funding opportunities
offered by such bodies as the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities through their Office of Digital Humanities (“Digital
Humanities Advancement Grants” n.d.) While the usefulness
of the term may fade, it presents an opportunity for folkloristic
intervention in important extradisciplinary conversations.
Two broad categories of digital scholarship inform the pres-
ent paper. These interdisciplinary methodologies—digital hu-
manities and digital ethnography—interestingly enough reflect
a longstanding division within disciplinary folkloristics: the
study of folklore as discrete texts, versus an ethnographic ap-
proach based in situated fieldwork among contemporary peo-
ple.3 In contemporary work, the tools and methods folklorists
employ generally tend toward the (digital) humanistic, focus-
ing on collecting and analyzing texts, or toward the (digital)
ethnographic, focusing on descriptions of cultural processes
and performances. In the following sections we briefly describe
these strands of digital scholarship as they exist outside of folk-
loristics, and discuss a few representative examples of each.
We stop short of offering comprehensive bibliographies, and in
describing these digital areas, we do not offer rigid definitions:
rather, we attempt to indicate, broadly, some ways in which

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 333

these terms are currently invoked before moving to a discus-

sion of existing folkloristic work that aligns with each area.

D I G I TA L H U M A N I T I E S
Despite the prevalence of digital approaches in fields other than
the humanities, digital humanities (or DH) tends to dominate
discussions of DS. In fact, within DH itself, the terms digital
humanities and digital scholarship are often used interchange-
ably (e.g., Courant et al. 2006; Anderson and McPherson 2011;
Rockwell 2011; Ayers 2013). But it is important here to note
that DH does not necessarily encompass all humanistic work
that has a digital component. DH has a history of its own (on
which, see Vanhoutte 2013), its own methodologies and theo-
retical orientations (though these are also diverse and interdis-
ciplinary). A humanistic project that makes use of computers or
otherwise deals with “the digital” may or may not cleave to DH-
specific orientations and methodologies. Much ethnographical-
ly-inflected work, humanistic in nature but focused on/in digital
technologies and cultures, does not fall within the current rubric
of DH (though there is no reason why it should not).
Digital humanities is often seen as a trans-disciplinary
amalgamation of computer-mediated approaches to the study
of texts. DH is viewed not as a singular field of study, but as “a
big tent for all digital scholarship in the humanities” (Vanhoutte
2013:144; see also Friedlander 2009:5; McGann 2011:194 note
8). Defining DH, in common with most disciplines, is difficult,
as Nyhan, Terras, and Vanhoutte point out in their introduc-
tion to an edited volume on the topic (2013). That volume
also includes a list of definitions of the field from DH practi-
tioners which illustrate the huge range of meanings attached
to it (Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte 2013). Nevertheless, some
key features emerge from the literature: DH approaches often
emphasize texts (in both the narrow sense of the written word
and the larger sense of bounded objects, such as paintings or
songs), textual analyses, and text encoding; digital archiving;
data visualization; open research and publication practices; and

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334 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

the construction of new digital tools to accomplish these and

related ends. In more general terms, DH frequently involves—
and has some of its deepest roots in—the rendering of informa-
tion from literary and other expressive sources into quantifiable
data, which is then used for description, comparison, and anal-
ysis, and often shared with the larger community of scholars
and audiences outside academia. DH emphasizes the digital, in
other words, as part of the process of doing scholarly work.
Examples of well-established digital humanities proj-
ects that highlight collections of materials to ease the path of
scholarship include the “Valley of the Shadow” project (Ay-
ers et al. n.d.),4 a seminal effort by the University of Virginia
historian to create an archive of letters, diaries, newspapers,
church and census records, and other materials that permit
in-depth comparison of a northern and a southern community
(Franklin County, PA, and Augusta County, VA, respectively)
in the years surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The text-intensive Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University
(Crane n.d.) has since the 1980s made primary and secondary
materials about the Greco-Roman world, 19th-century Amer-
ica, the Renaissance, and other periods and places available to
scholars, along with apparatuses to support automated analy-
sis and connection-building. “The Old Bailey Proceedings
Online, 1674-1913” (Hitchcock et al. 2018) offers “[a] fully
searchable edition of the largest body of texts [with accompa-
nying images] detailing the lives of non-elite people ever pub-
lished, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s
central trial court” along with an API that permits datamining
and other related textual analysis. The “Women Writers Proj-
ect,” now housed at Northeastern University (Women Writers
Project, Northeastern University 1999-2019), is another long-
term project that dates from the 1980s, focused on collecting
and sharing texts by pre-Victorian women and supporting a
range of text encoding projects.
Bodies of literary and visual documents and the appara-
tuses that support them are, however, only one kind of digital

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 335

humanities project. Other DH efforts employ approaches that

are less traditionally humanistic and may be more appropri-
ately described as being exemplars of digital scholarship writ
large. “Mapping the Republic of Letters” (“Mapping the Re-
public of Letters” n.d.) at Stanford University emphasizes net-
work analysis and other visualizations to illuminate the social
and epistolary connections among scholars in the eighteenth
century. The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia part-
nered with classicist Jenny Strauss Clay to produce a geospa-
tial analysis of the Catalogue of Ships from Book Two of the
Iliad. The resultant project, “Mapping the Catalogue of Ships”
(Clay, Evans, and Jasnow n.d.), revealed a “spatial mnemonic”
based in actual geography that assisted the poet Homer in his
epic feat of poetic memorization. Tool-building is represented
by projects such as Omeka (omeka.org) and Neatline (neat-
line.org); the former is an open-source publishing platform
for media-rich online exhibits developed at the Roy Rosen-
zweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason
University and the latter—also a project of the Scholars’ Lab
at the University of Virginia—extends Omeka by making it
easy to display digital collections on timelines and maps.
DH/DS projects need not take long to develop: the “Torn
Apart/Separados” project was rapidly developed at four sites
over a six-day period in 2018 to aggregate and cross-reference
“publicly available data to visualize the geography of Don-
ald Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy in 2018 and
immigration incarceration in the USA in general” (Ahmed et
al. 2018). A large number of “spontaneous event collections”
have been created in an effort to collect a body of web con-
tent—articles, images, recordings, social media posts, and
more—during times of crisis such as the April 2007 Virginia
Tech shooting or the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
A number of such projects and the tools for managing them
have been created by the Archive-It team of the Internet Ar-
chive and are available for study (archive-it.org/blog/projects/
spontaneous-events/).

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336 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

D I G I TA L E T H N O G R A P H Y
Ethnography, a set of methods for the study of culture (usually
through situated research involving participant observation), is a
hallmark of much contemporary folkloristic work in the United
States. Ethnography can easily be understood to include digital
cultures/cultures of the digital; but the proliferation of digital
technologies and the surprising ways in which humans engage
with them has led to different orientations toward the digital
and different understandings of its ethnographic implications.
Digital ethnography has been called “a method for repre-
senting real-life cultures through combining the characteristic
features of digital media with the elements of story” (Under-
berg and Zorn 2013:10). This view is less common in the litera-
ture, however, which tends instead to view digital ethnography
as ethnographic study of digital cultures. In line with this view
it has elsewhere been called “ethnographic research on online
practices and communications” (Varis 2016:55).5 Broader still
is the framework put forth by Sarah Pink et al., who view digital
ethnography as the study of everyday engagement with digital
technologies (which includes online or “virtual” ethnography),
but one which downplays the digital itself—the proper focus of
ethnography being, after all, social processes and human rela-
tionships (2016:7, 9–11). A great deal of effort has been dedi-
cated to exploring virtual worlds, such as online video games;
two useful critical reviews (both by anthropologists) that situ-
ate ethnographies of virtual or digital worlds within the broader
ethnographic literature are Manning (2009) and Nardi (2015).6
In general, then, where DH emphasizes the use of digital tools
to aid scholarly work, digital ethnography tends to emphasize
the digital as the object or site of study of study, be it the study
of human use of digital technologies, or cultural processes oc-
curring wholly or partly within digital environments.
Ducheneaut et al. (2007) offer an example of an ethnogra-
phy of a virtual world focused primarily on issues of design.
In their study of a massively-multiplayer online video game,
the authors consider social spaces in different in-game cities,

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 337

evaluating their relative success or failure as sites of meaning-

ful player socialization. In their conclusion the authors speak
directly to the creators of such worlds: “Game designers should
consider ways of supporting player-hosted events in a game
world’s major cities. Not only will proximity to transportation
hubs, banks and markets help would-be third places attract
more people, but the creative socializing of players will make
the major cities much more interesting places than they current-
ly are” (157). In a very different kind of study, Manning (2013)
argues that “alts”—alternate player-characters controlled by a
single individual within a given game world—“as a third term
in addition to the player and the main character, disrupt and
complicate the ontological categories of online worlds, catego-
ries like identity, humanity and agency” (2). In the end, Man-
ning claims, the “pathology” of alts destabilizes the ostensibly
clear-cut relationship between in-game avatars and the offline
humans supposedly controlling them.
An especially important work in this area is Ethnography
and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (2012), by Tom
Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. True
to its title, the book provides a useful set of guidelines for work-
ing in such “virtual” spaces as online video games. Notably, the
authors are uncomfortable with terms like digital ethnography
“because ethnographic methodology translates elegantly and
fluidly to virtual worlds.” They continue, “While the specifici-
ties of these spaces prompt their own set of considerations, the
ethnographic research paradigm does not undergo fundamental
transformation or distortion in its journey to virtual arenas be-
cause ethnographic approaches are always modified for each
fieldsite, and in real time as the research progresses” (4). Ac-
cepting that ethnography is, in the end, ethnography, we sug-
gest that, as a term of transition, “digital ethnography,” under-
stood as ethnographic work centrally concerned with digital
technologies and/or cultures of the digital, remains useful in
the present. It cues our attention to explicit differences (of top-
ic, of fieldsite) from earlier written ethnographies, differences

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338 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

which may be important for reasons of funding, course design,

and points of contact with other scholarly areas that likewise
invoke the digital qualifier.7
An example of a digital ethnography which moves away
from a focus on culture within digital environments and toward
the broader role of digital technologies in (offline) vernacular
experience is Jenna Burrell’s essay, “The Fieldsite as a Net-
work: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research” (2017).
Burrell usefully traces changing attitudes toward ethnographic
fieldwork, beginning with the classical model of the bounded,
physical fieldsite, and moving through Marcus’s (1995) seminal
concept of multi-sited ethnography. Applying Marcus’s frame-
work to her work on internet cafés in Ghana, Burrell engages
with people’s use of digital technologies from a largely offline
perspective. At first Burrell’s study, aimed at “understanding
how the Internet was described and spoken about among users”
(54), failed to produce the insights she had hoped for: users of
the cafés did not interact with one another in the ways she had
anticipated. Reconceiving of her fieldsite as a point embedded
in a larger network (which also included other aspects of in-
formants’ day-to-day experiences as well as the distant people
with whom they communicated in the cafés), Burrell was able
to construct a more holistic, emically-validated understanding
of the interrelatedness of the site to other sites, actors, and pro-
cesses. “By defining the fieldsite as a network … the fieldsite
transitions from a bounded space that the researcher dwells
within to something that more closely tracks the social phe-
nomenon under study” (58).

FOLKLORISTIC APPROACHES TO THE D I G I TA L

Relatively few folklorists have published work that draws ex-
plicitly on the digital/quantitative methods that characterize DH,
though there are some notable exceptions. Abello, Broadwell,
and Tangherlini’s “computational folkloristics” (2012) is very
much a DH approach, centered on tool-building and text analy-
sis. The computational approach Peter M. Broadwell and Tang-

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 339

herlini adopt for analyzing Danish legends (2016) depends in

large part on the literary strategy called distant reading, which,
according to its coiner Franco Moretti, refocuses attention
away from texts themselves to “units that are much larger or
smaller than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and
systems” (Moretti 2000:57). Moretti’s zoomed-out approach
relies on the acceptance of “law[s] of literary evolution” (58,
original emphasis) which can be assumed to operate every-
where.8 The articles in the 2016 special issue of the Journal of
American Folklore entitled “Big Folklore” (Tangherlini 2016),
in which Broadwell and Tangherlini’s piece appeared, focus on
similar quantitative, software-assisted approaches to the analy-
sis of folklore texts. For example, in their article, “Automatic
Enrichment and Classification of Folktales in the Dutch Folk-
tale Database,” Meder and colleagues (2016) discuss the use of
machine learning in generating metadata about folk narratives,
explicitly situating this work in the context of DH (82). Com-
putational folkloristics, then, in common with extradisciplinary
DH work, focuses on the use of computers in the classification
and analysis of texts.
A similar textual emphasis (manifested in a concern with col-
lecting and archiving texts) is reflected in the call for papers for
the 2016 Towards Digital Folkloristics conference, held in Latvia:

During the last few decades, the use of information tech-

nology has become an inherent aspect of everyday life; the
discipline of folkloristics faces an interdisciplinary “digi-
tal turn” and the extension of the folkloristic “field” into
the realm of virtual reality. In folklore archives and other
cultural heritage institutions, the engagement with IT has
evolved far beyond the simple creation of digital copies
and cataloguing. The expansion of digitally mediated en-
vironments, tools and methods for folklore collecting, pro-
cessing and research as well as for communicating with
the “folk” promises to change the archival world by be-
coming a sustainable axis for folklore research.

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340 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

The presence of information technology has been persis-

tent enough in the daily agendas of tradition archives and
folkloristic research to launch a reflexive discussion about
the disciplinary outcomes, challenges and perspectives of
“the digital age.” (“Towards Digital Folkloristics: Research
Perspectives, Archival Praxis, Ethical Challenges” n.d.)

In the framework alluded to here, digital folkloristics implies

an IT-supported infrastructure of digitization and archiving.
Without question, digital archives are a crucial way of enhanc-
ing preservation capacities and extending access to collections.
The goals of the CFP also align with the American Council of
Learned Societies study cited above, with its focus on digi-
tal tools and databases. An important contemporary example
of this mode of digital scholarship in the United States is the
National Folklore Archives Initiative (NFAI), a project of the
American Folklore society, which seeks to provide information
about widely dispersed folklore collections and, eventually,
digital access to their contents (“National Folklore Archives
Initiative—American Folklore Society” n.d.).
But contemporary folklore study involves both textual
and ethnographic approaches. Despite the Latvia conference’s
broad claim to represent a new kind of folkloristics—meaning
the discipline as a whole—the words ethnography/ethnograph-
ic appear nowhere in the call for papers and in just three of the
thirty-seven abstracts (one instance of which is in the name of
a sponsoring archive). It is surely true that ethnography gener-
ates texts, and that these texts must live somewhere (such as
a database). But a digital folkloristics which largely excludes
ethnographic methodology seems problematic.
Far more folkloristic work has centered on digital cultures.
Notably, much of this work is also characterized by a broadly
textual/object-oriented focus. As Anthony Bak Buccitelli notes,
“In keeping with the difficulties of locating performer and audi-
ence identities in the same way that might be done in offline
performative settings, the study of digital folklore has often

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 341

forsaken performance-oriented approaches for textual studies

that can be more easily conducted without direct knowledge
of performer identities” (2012:62). A more mechanical reason
also exists for the prevalence of textual studies of digital cul-
tures: since so much of what we think of as “the Internet” is
textual, often in the sense of literal written text (see Beaulieu
2004:154–56; 158–59; Boellstorff et al. 2012:191)—and more
generally in the broader sense of bounded, discrete “objects”
available to study—it is tempting to focus on the content of
digital expressive culture and the movement of digital artifacts
through communicative media. But as Boellstorff et al. note,
“When ethnographers study forums and wikis, it is in the con-
text of participant observation research. In other words, while
humanities scholars study texts in and of themselves, ethnog-
raphers study texts as they link up to people in a communi-
ty or activity. Texts may be part of that study, but in the case
of virtual world ethnography, texts alone are not sufficient”
(2012:119).9 Robert Glenn Howard likewise reminds us that
scholars should direct their attention to the “interpretive com-
munities” that form around online texts, rather than focusing on
the texts alone (2008a:194).
But even works that do focus on digital “texts” tend in
practice to involve both textual and ethnographic components
(in the simplest sense of concerted efforts to describe a digi-
tal “culture,” often through participant observation). In his in-
troduction to Folklore and the Internet, for example, Trevor J.
Blank suggests that the Internet serves as “a folkloric conduit”
(2009:7). Blank’s explicit focus is on online texts such as chain
emails, which, he argues, facilitate the study of “the role of con-
duits in narrative transference” (9). But of course, as products
of human actors, these texts are caught up in complex social
networks and processes, which Blank acknowledges, noting
the presence of folk groups online, the human agents behind
Internet traditions, and the emergent quality of those traditions
(9-12). Other folkloristic work on digital cultures that contains
both textual and ethnographic components (by no means an

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342 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

exhaustive list) include Robert Glenn Howard’s explorations

of the “vernacular web” (2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b,
2015); Michael Kinsella’s (2011) study of legend-tripping on
the Internet; Bill Ellis’ (2012) research on an online community
of animation cell collectors; Montana Miller’s (2012) explora-
tion of the ethics of digital fieldwork; Buccitelli’s examination
of performativity among right-wing discussion forums users
(2012), his discussion of Bostonian practices linking on-and of-
fline spatialities (2013), and several contributors’ chapters from
his edited volume Race and Ethnicity in Digital Culture (for
example, Buccitelli 2018; Tolgensbakk 2018; Li 2018; and, in a
somewhat different register, Lawrence 2018); Whitney Phillips’
study of Internet trolling (2015); and the recent collection of es-
says on Slender Man, which focuses on emergent practices and
cultures among online communities as well as on the corpus of
texts they collaboratively produce (Blank and McNeill 2018),
including two chapters by Tolbert (2018a; 2018b).10
These and other folkloristic works, which examine expres-
sive cultural processes circulating around and communicated
through digital technologies, surely deserve inclusion in the
category of digital folkloristics. But comparatively few folklor-
ists have engaged explicitly and in a sustained manner with ei-
ther of the broader methodologies of DH or digital ethnography.
None, to our knowledge, have done both in the course of a sin-
gle project. Taking text-oriented and quantitative approaches
on the one hand, and situated ethnographic approaches on the
other, we suggest that digital folkloristics can and should occu-
py the fruitful intersection of both orientations, illuminating not
only the texts and processes into and by which digital cultures
are organized and mediated, but the social networks (in both
the sociological and Internet-mediated senses of that term) and
individual human actors who create and mobilize them.

D I G I TA L F O L K L O R I S T I C S , H O L I S T I C A L LY
The possibilities for uniting textual and quantitative approach-
es with ethnographic ones, always rich and often unrealized,

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 343

extend into—indeed, are extended by—the advent of digital

tools. In their handbook for ethnography in virtual worlds,
Boellstorff et al. acknowledge this explicitly: “We recog-
nize the potential for collaboration between quantitative and
qualitative researchers to bring about research breakthroughs.
Quantitative data can tell us about widespread trends…. Par-
ticipant observation and interview data make quantitative data
more useful by making it more meaningful” (2012:127–28).
Not every study need utilize both quantitative/digital tools
and engage in ethnographic fieldwork of digital cultures, but
acknowledging the potential links between these disparate
approaches—and seeking opportunities for combining them
when doing so may yield greater insights—should be part and
parcel of digital folkloristics, precisely as ethnographic and
textual approaches are understood together to make up con-
temporary folkloristics as a whole.
Take, for example, a research project that considers both on-
and offline discursive practices associated with the so-called
alt-right. This hypothetical study has plenty of models to draw
on: textual/quantitative approaches, on one hand, and ethno-
graphic/qualitative on the other, have already been brought to
bear on related topics. On the quantitative side, Sean M. Ed-
dington (2018) discusses the use of specialized computer soft-
ware to elucidate connections between the 2016 Trump presi-
dential campaign and hate groups, based on the use of Twitter
hashtags.11 Eddington uses an app called Twitter Archiver to
collect tweets using specific hashtags, such as #MAGA and
#MakeAmericaGreatAgain, ultimately analyzing nearly 8,000
tweets from a single day in November 2016. Using a text-min-
ing program called AutoMap, Eddington discovers a link be-
tween the Trump hashtags and extremist and white supremacist
content (4-6). Eddington finds, “First, theoretically, #MAGA
created an organizational space to engage in a global White su-
premacist discourse…. Second, the use of #MAGA as a space
for engagement lends itself to the types of content shared: sub-
tle and overt” (8-9).

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344 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

An ethnographic approach to a closely related topic is of-

fered by anthropologists Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa
(2015), who argue convincingly for the treatment of hashtags
as ethnographic fieldsites. Bonilla and Rosa suggest that #Fer-
guson not only served as a way to convey information about
an important current event, but a way of drawing media at-
tention, eventually becoming a form of online activism, and
spawning related hashtags centered on racially motivated po-
lice violence. And folklorist Sheila Bock (2017) studied the
use of hashtags surrounding celebrity chef Paula Deen. Bock
argues that Black Twitter’s use of hashtags parallels the estab-
lished tradition of “signifyin(g),” criticizing not only the chef
but wider patterns of entrenched racism through the invention
of food names which reference racist stereotypes and histori-
cal events such as lynchings.
Still another ethnographic example is offered by Pohjonen
and Udupa (2017), who examine specific forms of online rheto-
ric branded by officials as hate speech in India and Ethiopia.
To understand what they term “extreme speech,” Pohjonen and
Udupa call for “a thorough ethnographic exploration to grasp
how different situational features, including technology, on-
line agency, and political cultures, can lead to various kinds
of speech—harmless in some contexts, but with serious politi-
cal ramifications in others” (1176). The authors describe work-
shops they held in Ethiopia to understand political discourse in
online spaces and formulate a more appropriate definition of
hate speech consistent with the emic usage of people who en-
gaged in politicized speech online. They conclude that sweep-
ing categorizations of online speech actually play into existing
structures of power, and that an ethnographic approach which
privileges emic knowledge and practice may act as a corrective
(1183-1186).12
Of the studies just cited that engage with politicized speech
online, one is quantitative and computer-driven, while the oth-
ers are ethnographic. The ethnographic studies in turn differ
from one another in that the hashtag studies looked primarily at

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 345

online speech in online contexts, while the study of politicized

speech in India and Ethiopia discussed online speech patterns
with participants in offline workshops. The four projects rep-
resent diverse approaches to the digital, both as an object or
context of, and a tool for, study, but the parallels are immedi-
ately apparent: all focus on digital discursive practices among
real people who use social media; three of the four looked ex-
clusively at hashtags, which have emerged as a significant or-
ganizing force and rhetorical tool in contemporary social and
political life; implicitly or explicitly, all point to ways in which
digital discursive practices may relate to extra-digital attitudes
and behaviors; and all, unquestionably, yield insights amena-
ble to contemporary folkloristics. They all also lend support to
Buccitelli’s claim that “folklorists must stop thinking of digi-
tal technologies as simply media that record or transmit offline
folklore. Instead, we must think of them as places of perfor-
mance” (2012:73, original emphasis).
Digital folkloristics, as we envision it, could encompass
both quantitative/computer-assisted and qualitative/ethno-
graphic approaches, and could also offer a space for them to
combine in novel ways, guided by folkloristics’ long famil-
iarity with tracing the spread of texts through time and space
and by its sensitivity to the social and historical contexts and
processes in which expressive culture emerges. Returning to
our hypothetical research on alt-right discursive practices, and
building on the examples just considered, such a study might
begin by generating a collection of thousands of examples of
alt-right memes and hashtags before undertaking a large-scale,
computer-assisted, textual/historical analysis of these textual
artifacts. It could then move to both online and in-person eth-
nographic fieldwork, in order to understand the use of these
discursive tools, as well as how online practices relate to the
offline lives of these users. The researcher, through both quan-
titative and qualitative means, might attempt to identify the
social networks through which the hashtags and memes circu-
late and the public figures around whom they coalesce, mining

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346 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

data and identifying links with software designed for these pur-
poses. Ethnographic work could identify individuals’ locations
with the larger trends and networks illuminated by quantitative
analysis. This would help in understanding the people who use
these hashtags and memes, how they see the ideals represented
by these forms of expressive culture in relation to their daily
lives, and how their media use and engagements with these dis-
courses position them vis-à-vis other individuals and groups.
Familiar folkloristic concerns would be readily apparent
through all of this: the establishment and policing of group
boundaries and associated emic/etic knowledges and perfor-
mances; performative competence; tradition and variation; ver-
nacular belief. Quantitative tools can generate a huge usable
pile of data—in this case, in the form of memes and archived
Tweets—and illustrate its dissemination throughout the social
networks being observed (literally, as quantitative tools are
especially well suited to data visualization). Ethnographic re-
search can get to the people who generate and use these digital
artifacts, and work toward an understanding of their daily lives
that isolated data alone cannot.
A digital folkloristics that accounts for the field’s various
methodologies and for related developments in other disci-
plines is entirely within reach. Scholars working with large
collections of archived materials will benefit from the textual-
quantitative approaches that have characterized DH scholar-
ship (the “computational folkloristics” expounded by Abello
et al.). This might include collections such as those docu-
mented in the American Folklore Society’s Folklore Collec-
tions Database, part of the NFAI cited above, which serves as
“an open-access online resource providing searchable infor-
mation about folklore archival collections” held at various in-
stitutions around the US (“AFS Folklore Collection Database”
n.d.). Such collections may be originally “offline” (e.g., digi-
tizations of folk songs) or “born-digital” (e.g., meme data-
bases), or a combination thereof. Other scholars interested in
the cultures of online/virtual communities/spaces or of new/

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 347

emerging media may find in digital ethnography fertile meth-

odological ground. And combining DH, digital ethnography,
and folkloristics’ own unique disciplinary orientations can
lead to still richer insights.
A similar call is made by Mike Fortun, Kim Fortun, and
George E. Marcus (2017) in the first chapter of Routledge’s
recent Companion to Digital Ethnography, in which the au-
thors argue for (and describe one attempt at) a digital hu-
manities approach to anthropological research. They discuss
PECE, the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnog-
raphy (worldpece.org), and the possibilities of an open, it-
erative, interdisciplinary, digitally-enabled anthropology. We
face a moment, Fortun et al. claim, “when anthropologists
have ample tools and ample spaces in which to work and play
with them, toward multiple theoretical and practical ends…
they have ample opportunity and need to do so…within new
forms of collaboration” (2017:11). So too, we suggest, with
folkloristics, a field equally well-positioned to take advan-
tage of the collaborative opportunities of digital tools and ap-
proaches, which already reflect the various orientations and
concerns of folklore scholarship. We would be well advised
to look beyond folklore’s borders as we enter more fully into
the digital. This means not only engaging with scholars in al-
lied fields, but also presenting work on topics of broad inter-
est in ways accessible to the broadest possible audiences. As
Boellstorff and colleagues note, the interdisciplinary nature
of “virtual worlds research” can lead to problems of under-
standing. Avoiding jargon and actively reaching beyond the
walls of our disciplines is critical in such work (Boellstorff et
al. 2012:194). This claim is easily extended to all of the digi-
tally-enabled and digitally-focused work we have considered
here. Digital approaches can help us to actively engage with
colleagues in other disciplines and remind us of—and allow
meaningful interactions between—the diversity of methods
and concerns within our own field.

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348 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

NOTES
1. A recent conversation Johnson held with a humanities faculty mem-
ber echoed just this sentiment: the only point of doing anything digi-
tally, as far as this faculty member was concerned, is to produce new
disciplinary insight. Anything else is a waste of precious faculty time.
2 On the topic of “openness,” see Goodfellow 2013.
3 This is an oversimplification: textual studies necessarily touch on cul-
tural issues, and ethnographic studies within folkloristics tend to take
cultural “texts” or performances as points of departure. The schism
between literary/historic-geographic and ethnographic approaches in
folkloristics is beyond the scope of this paper, but for an overview see
Bascom 1953 and Jones 1979.
4 Citations to these projects are attempts to bring multi-authored/
staffed, multivalent works into line with Chicago style, which does
not always successfully reflect the often-large project teams involved.
This is an important point raised by many scholars working in DH:
assigning proper credit for works involving many people with di-
verse skills who make diverse contributions. Our attempt at a cita-
tional compromise here should not be taken as devaluing the con-
tributions of project staff whose names are left out; rather it speaks
to the limitations of conventional publication and the constraints of
conventional scholarship.
5 The difference in these orientations also reflects the bifurcation,
discussed previously, of digital scholarship into digital tools and
digital subjects.
6 Thanks to Paul Manning for pointing us towards these surveys of
the literature.
7 A handful of centers and programs have sprung up that make explicit
the growing interest in this area and the relevance, at least at present,
of the “digital” qualifier: RMIT University in Australia has DERC,
the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (“Digital Ethnography
Research Centre (DERC)—RMIT University” n.d.), while the Uni-
versity of Central Florida has the Digital Ethnography Lab (“Digital
Ethnography Lab” n.d.). Digital anthropology and digital sociology
are terms which have also entered the social scientific lexicon. Vir-
ginia Commonwealth University now offers a Master’s of Science
degree with a focus on Digital Sociology (“VCU Digital Sociology”
n.d.); University College London offers one in Digital Anthropology
(“MSc Digital Anthropology” 2018).
8 Moretti’s language of laws and evolution, and his focus on the
comparative study of texts, contrast markedly with contemporary

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DIGITAL FOLKLORISTICS 349

ethnographic approaches, which tend to eschew evolutionary and

universalizing claims and focus on cultural processes and perfor-
mances in specific local contexts. On the other hand, the dividing
of texts into constituent parts, and the fitting of texts into analyti-
cal genres, naturally resonates with literary and historic-geographic
approaches to folklore study. For an overview of the historic-geo-
graphic method—and an attempt at defending it which itself em-
bodies many of the method’s most problematic assumptions—see
Goldberg 1984. Goldberg outlines what she sees as the strengths of
the method: “It schematizes a lot of information, collating dozens
or hundreds of tales, each with, say, five to thirty motifs, so that
the reader can remember the main characteristics of the tale and
its subtypes and can refer back to the study to find out about minor
points” (5). The usefulness of computers to such an undertaking is
immediately apparent.
9 Perhaps ironically, Boellstorff et al. would not recognize many of
the studies described here as being properly ethnographic at all. For
them, ethnography necessarily involves, above all else, careful, situ-
ated, and extended periods of participant observation: “The four of us
have, for example, reviewed manuscripts in which authors claimed
they conducted an ‘ethnography’ in only seven days, or labeled as
‘ethnography’ a study in which the only data collection method was
interviewing, or brought a game character to ‘level 85’ and contend-
ed that voilà! an ethnography had (supposedly) been born” (2012: 3).
We take a somewhat broader view of the possibilities of ethnographic
study, in keeping with its core meaning—the description of culture,
with no specific time limit attached—but accept that participant ob-
servation, in the pedestrian sense of interacting with real people on
their own terms, is key.
10 For a more extensive bibliography of folkloristic work on digital cul-
tures, see Buccitelli 2018, 12-13, note 9.
11 Hashtags are a method for flagging social media posts in order to link
them to ongoing discussions, as well as to signal alignment with or
against various social and political themes and issues.
12 Folklorist Jeannie Banks Thomas (2018) also conducted a hashtag-
related study; her work relied on what she terms “folkloric and nar-
rative analysis” (98), or a kind of close reading of the contemporary
media narratives that hashtags index (specifically #BlackLivesMatter
and related hashtags). While very different from the other studies
considered here, Thomas’ approach represents yet another possibility
for scholarly engagement with politicized speech online.

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350 JEFFREY A. TOLBERT AND ERIC D. M. JOHNSON

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