[FAS] GEN ED 1097: Tradition, Performance, and Culture

The AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus is a vocabulary that can be used to improve access to information about folklore, ethnomusicology, ethnology, and related fields. The American Folklore Society developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and supported by a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

An authoritative bibliography of folklore, listing general overviews, reference works, and resources on the study and theory of folklore, applied and public folklore, and the history of folklore studies. It also includes a listing of key collections, standard indices, and journals, as well as resources on oral genres, speech, narrative, folktale, myth, legend, humor, ballad and song, social genres, belief, custom, ritual, festival, music and dance, games and play, material genres, art and craft, architecture, food, medicine, dress, people and places, race and ethnicity, religion, and more.

Identifies themes, figures of popular tradition, tales, modern myths, folk arts, superstitions, and characters featured in the world's folk heritage.

Website of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress containing free publications giving an overview of folklife, including “American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures” by Mary Hufford and “Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques.” They survey a diversity of cultures in the United States and encourage localized fieldwork on everyday life and folk arts in community contexts.

The American Folklore Society (AFS) serves the field of folklore studies, comprised of people and institutions that study and communicate knowledge about folklore throughout the world. Members of three groups made common cause by creating the AFS in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1888: scholars in then-developing humanities departments at colleges and universities, museum anthropologists, and private citizens with an interest in the subject. Today, the Society produces publications, meetings, and both print and web resources to support our members’ work to study, understand, and communicate about folklore, and to help them build professional and social networks inside and outside our field.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) contains metadata records —information describing an item —for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website. The DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.

Open Folklore is devoted to increasing the number of useful resources, published and unpublished, available in open access form for folklore studies and the communities with which folklorists partner. Includes books, journals, web archives, and gray literature.

Celebrated folklorist, Dorothy Noyes, offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the "humble theory" of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world.

Oring's introductory folklore text consists of a series of essays by leading scholars that give the student a solid sense of major folklore topics and interpretive techniques. Since 1986, when it was first published, this book has met the need for good instructional material at a time of tremendous growth in folklore programs and introductory courses in colleges and universities around the world.

Compiled to accompany the best-selling textbook, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, the selections in this anthology extend the discussion in diverse directions, alert the reader to new problems, and introduce alternative perspectives. The essays include folklore classics and recent works, and are organized in sections that correspond to the chapter headings in An Introduction.

Drawing extensively on archival sources, oral histories, and personal experience, the contributors explore the key individuals and central events in folklore programs at US and Canadian academic institutions and demonstrate how these programs have been shaped within broader cultural and historical contexts. Revealing the origins of graduate folklore programs, as well as their accomplishments, challenges, and connections, Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential read for all folklorists and those who are studying to become folklorists.

Scalar is a free, open-source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required, while also supporting collaborative authoring and reader commentary.

A section of the Qualitative Research Support guide, this is a Harvard Library Guide designed to prepare you to conduct interview research. You will find resources delineating the major types of interviews and brimming with advice on engaging interview participants, developing interview questions, as well as conducting, recording, transcribing, and coding interviews. The guide also has a section on finding and managing extant interview data, including oral histories.

A section of the same Qualitative Research Support guide listed above, with sources focused on approaches to conducting qualitative fieldwork, particularly in virtual environments.