Lecture Series: Folgert Karsdorp

Folgert Karsdorp is a PhD candidate at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he is involved in the Tunes & Tales project. He is affiliated with Radboud University and the eHumanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His research interests lie in computational text analysis in the context of ethnology, anthropology, literary theory and cultural evolution. See also www.folgertkarsdorp.nl.

From Rapacious Wolfs to Independent Women: Cultural Transmission of Little Red Riding Hood

In his lecture, Folgert Karsdorp presents new perspectives on the structure and development of story networks. A story network, defined as a non-hierarchical agglomeration of pre-textual relationships, represents a stream of retellings in which retellers modify and adapt retellings in a gradual and accumulative way. I investigate the development of the world’s biggest fairy tale icon: Little Red Riding Hood. No story has been retold, reinterpreted, recontextualized and reconfigured as often as the story about the little girl in red who meets a wolf in the forest. On the basis of a large collection of Dutch retellings of the story, I show that the evolution of its story network is largely determined by two random mechanisms of selection: cultural prominence and temporal attractiveness.