Grimm Annotations: Tracing Values in Transcultural Fairy Tales
Creators: name: Morollon Diaz-Faes, Alba
name: Baptista Alhinha, Catarina Isabel
name: Ribeiro Murteira, Carla Sofia
name: Pereira, Thales Estefani
name: Graca da Silva, Sara
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: Although often disregarded as a lesser form of literature, fairy tales are a valuable repository of information on cultural histories, as pervasive stories that "migrate on soft feet" (Warner 2016), carrying the moral messages of their time across borders. Taking Brothers Grimm's foundational collection, Childhood and Household Tales (1812-1857), as the starting point, this poster presents the methodologies employed by the VAST project to annotate and analyse the values weaved into these tales, tracing their evolution and adaptability through changing contexts.
Values, regarded as the guiding principles shaping our collective identity, are essential for understanding our cultural heritage and communal legacy. They embody the essence of what societies deem important and worthy, define moral norms, and delineate what is right and wrong (Haidt 2013). These principles are inherently dynamic and constantly adapting, being appropriated, and re-emerging in varying tangible and intangible forms throughout history and across geographies. The VAST project aims to uncover these intricacies, focusing on values considered pivotal to the European Union, such as democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance, human dignity, and the rule of law, which act as a unifying axis for the formation of sustainable communities and societal wellbeing.
We selected twelve tales from Brothers Grimm's collection, both canonical and non-canonical , for their rich value content and cultural significance. Making use of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther or ATU Index (Uther 2004), a crucial tool for comparative folklore studies, connections were drawn with comparable tale-types and national variants from Portugal, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, and Cyprus, enabling a comprehensive cross-cultural analysis. This comparative analysis served to highlight the universality of certain moral values, as well as the nuanced adaptations reflecting the socio-cultural contexts of different topographies. Manual annotation using VAST's Ellogon Tool (https://annotation.vast-project.eu/) played a pivotal role in this exploration, with a dual-step process of annotating explicit and implicit references to values, providing a detailed corpus-based analysis unachievable by automated techniques alone (Reiter et al., 2019).
Despite the persisting challenges posed by the reliance on translations and the vastness of text involved in comparative literature studies, digital humanities and computational methods offer innovative solutions (Wilkens 2015). These methodologies aid in identifying and assessing literary patterns across scales. The poster, thus, not only sheds light on the adaptability and universality of moral values depicted in fairy tales, but also serves as a gateway for scholars and the general public into the realm of comparative fairy and folk tale studies, highlighting the significance and potential of these narratives in understanding our collective moral compass across time and space.
Haidt, Jonathan (2013). The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage Books, New York.
Reiter, N., Willand, M. and Gius, E. (2019). "A Shared Task for the Digital Humanities Chapter 1: Introduction to Annotation, Narrative Levels and Shared Tasks." Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2(1), 1–24.
Uther H.-J (2004). The Types of International Folktales. A classification and bibliography. Parts I-III. Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications.
Warner, Marina ( 2016). Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York.
Wilkens, Matthew (2015). "Digital Humanities and Its Application in the Study of Literature and Culture." Comparative Literature, 67(1):11–20.