About the Project
Project Origins
This website is part of a research project that seeks to explore the correlations between speech and gender in Russian fairy tales from the Afanas′ev collection. The project itself is part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Brackenridge Fellowship Program, which supports independent undergraduate research. The program, which is run out of the University’s Honors College, funds research in all areas of academic study.
The idea for this project was in part conceived in response to the materials and concepts taught in Russian Fairy Tales (RUSS 0090). In particular, Ruth Bottigheimer's work on the relationship between speech and gender in the Grimm corpus served as an inspiration for this research project
The Research
Folk fairy tales, like folklore in general, differ from literature in that they lack a specific author and often reflect the beliefs, customs, and cultural practices of the community in which they were created. Because of their simultaneous ability to reflect a culture and perpetuate its values, the study of the messages that fairy tales contain lends itself well to an examination of gender roles. Fairy tales have been both criticized and praised for their depictions of young women and girls. Is the princess a passive object awaiting the salvation of her prince, or an intelligent and kind role model who teaches young girls important life lessons?
One way to explore the gender implications of folk fairy tales is to examine the relationship between gender and agency. As Ruth Bottigheimer points out, agency can be analyzed through the type and amount of speech allocated to different male and female characters. The primary goal of this research is to determine the connections between speech and gender in Russian fairy tales and to discover how these connections may differ from those found in other fairy tale traditions. Some of the research questions this project seeks to answer revolve around not only the speech patterns of men and women, but also the speech patterns of positive and negative characters. For example, do witches and other negative female characters speak more often and more forcefully than their male counterparts? Do “good” women—whether heroines or fairy godmothers—speak words of wisdom or are they mostly silent?
Answering these questions involves examining the use of direct and indirect speech and studying the verbs of speech associated with different character types. In order to retrieve this data from a large number of tales, this project employs a variety of computing tools to collect, calculate, and display information. The tales themselves are encoded using xml,which supports the formal association of specific textual moments with narrative functions. The speeches within each text are tagged and the speaker is associated with his or her speech. When a verb of speech occurs in conjunction with a speech act, it is also associated with that act and thus becomes linked with the speaker as well. The project employs a number of ancillary xml-based technologies, including xslt,which is used to extract, analyze, and display the information tagged in the original documents. In addition to collecting raw data, the project seeks to display the data collected in a relevant and interactive way. This site is designed to display research findings and function as a research tool.
Why Digital Humanities?
Both the project and this site adopt a somewhat unconventional, interdisciplinary approach in order to solve humanities-based research questions. The site will function as an interactive and dynamic research tool that will allow the user to configure the parameters for generating custom reports. Why is it advantageous to use computational tools to study gender in Russian fairy tales? The first and most obvious reason is that some sort of systematic approach to data collection is preferred, and in fact necessary, for an accurate analysis of a large amount of text. It would be impossible to record thousands of individual speech acts and determine statistical correlations without computing tools. In addition, if used properly, xml will prevent errors on the part of the scholar. For example, the schema used in this project checks to make sure that all speeches are associated with a speaker and that the speaker is in fact a character found somewhere in the text.
With that said, why not simply use a spreadsheet to record the data? Typing observations into a separate spreadsheet or database would provide an opportunity to introduce error. The xml-based approach, which extracts the analytical data directly from the prose text, is not immune to error, but it minimizes the opportunity for error by obviating the need for the researcher to enter the same information in multiple places. The data being collected in this project is hierarchical in nature, which fits perfectly with the tree based structure of xml. In addition, with xml the same file is being used to create a readable version of a tale, to extract and organize the information about the speech in the tale, and to generate reports about the entire collection of tales. By using xml, any changes that are made, whether they involve adding a new tale or generating a new report, can be updated simultaneously.
- Afanas′ev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, Norbert Guterman, Alexander Alexeieff, and Roman Jakobson. Russian Fairy Tales. New York: Random House, 2006.
- Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “Silenced Women in the Grimms' Tales: the ‘Fit’ Between Fairy Tales and Their Historical Context.” Ruth Bottigheimer, ed Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. 1986.
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