ALGOtalk #5: Sabine Slowik
Hosted by the ALGOFOLK project, Sabine Slowik (University of Regensburg) will give a talk titled "Project StoryMachine: Redefining folklore in the digital age".
Hovedinnhold
Sabine Slowik is a research assistant for the interdisciplinary British-German project “StoryMachine” at the DIMAS (Department of Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies) at the University of Regensburg. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese Studies and a Master’s degree in Comparative European Ethnology. Her research, based on ethnographic and qualitative methods, has explored the representation of history in digital games and urban identity constructions through intangible cultural heritage.
The TMS-funded ALGOFOLK project invites her to give a talk titled:
Project StoryMachine: Redefining folklore in the digital age
In an era marked by challenges like misinformation and populist separatism, folklore remains vital to the construction of identity and transcultural understanding. However, traditional digital approaches focus primarily on archiving and digitisation, often neglecting analysis, interactivity, and emerging folklore. Project StoryMachine, an interdisciplinary collaboration involving six partner institutions in the UK and Germany, addresses these gaps by integrating spatial hypertext and recommender systems into a dynamic platform for deep-linking folkloristic narratives. The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), seeks to preserve, explore, and expand access to folklore traditions through the creation of an interactive digital infrastructure: StoryMachine. It offers new opportunities for investigating identity construction, narrative motifs, and cultural commonalities across geographic and demographic lines. Beyond folklore, StoryMachine’s tools redefine authorship and human-machine co-creation.
This talk offers a general overview of how the project unites scholars from folklore studies, digital humanities, narrative studies, psychology, and computer science to examine collaborative digital methods, community engagement, and the psychological aspects of interacting with AI-driven storytelling systems and invites open discussion and feedback, e. g. on innovative approaches to data collection, analysis and archiving of digital and algorithmic folklore.
This talk will be in English, and will be followed by a Q&A.
