A dataset of origin motifs of major Chinese mythological characters

Abstract

Myths is an important carrier of traditional Chinese culture. There are numerous myths of different ethnic minorities, rich in content and diverse in form. Many mythological characters have become precious memories in the course of human history and Chinese civilization. With the analysis of mythical figures as the starting point, we take relevant mythological texts and narratives as research topics and important data sources in the field of humanities and social sciences, which is of great cultural significance and academic value in promoting the construction of big data in humanities, deepening the analysis of traditional Chinese cultural data, and innovating new methods of humanities and social science research. In this paper, we took the origin narrative motif of 50 core mythological characters in China as the research object, and collected 1,620 valid data from them, including the standard fields of motif, example, nationality, place of spread and source of literature. Meanwhile, we systematically analyzed and explained the data sources, data collection methods, data classification and structure. Moreover, we described the data samples in detail; and on the basis of listing relevant dataset examples, we further carried out a multi-dimensional statistical analysis of the way of generation, ethnic groups and geographical location, etc. Finally, we provided some suggestions on the application of the dataset in exploring the connotation of China’s multi-ethnic culture, cross regional cultural research and analysis of Chinese traditional culture.