In Thinking Folkore: Approaching Dialect from Folkoristic, Ethnological, and Computational Perspectives we address the question of dialect and supra-dialect of a folk song as a textological problem associated with the texture (melody) of the text.
Our technological challenge arises from the possibility of analysing large amounts of data gathered in digitized folklore archives. In doing so, we focus on supporting the main theme of the project, which analyses the use of dialect and supra-dialect in spoken and sung word, using field recordings and transcriptions in the Institute's archive. The key question is to what extent novel audio analysis and music information retrieval methods can automate the search for words in their different dialectal forms in field recordings and simultaneously quantify the phonetic differences between their pronunciation.