Sites of (re)Collection: Creating the Danish Folklore Nexus

We explore the scholarly concerns and technical considerations involved in creating a digital interface to the folklore collections of Evald Tang Kristensen (1843–1929), one of the world’s most prolific collectors of folklore. The two interfaces we designed, the Danish Folklore Nexus (DFL 1.0) and ETKSpace (DFL 2.0), represent differing approaches to the challenges inherent in curating a large collection of non-digital materials for online presentation and designing a digital environment that enables folklore scholars to access and explore the collection in a straightforward and intellectually enlightening manner. Among these challenges are those related to the bulk digitization of archival assets, the storage of those assets in a secure and persistent manner, and the selection of appropriate presentation technologies, database structures, and metadata formats. Predicated on the idea of fusing “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) to “close reading,” the Danish Folklore Nexus provides one possible solution to the pressing need for simple yet robust methods for navigating a folklore collection along multiple axes of introspection. We also present our work on ETKSpace (DFL 2.0), an online portal to the entire corpus (approximately three thousand informants, twelve thousand place names, and sixty thousand records) that incorporates a faceted browsing interface similar to an online shopping site, allowing researchers to rapidly delimit and export research corpora for more detailed types of analysis. Our discussion presents “lessons learned” as well as considerations of possible future directions for this type of digital archival scholarship.