From Spoken Word to Digital Corpus: The Calum Maclean Project

Abstract

The Calum Maclean Collection (http://www.calum-maclean-project.celtscot.ed.ac.uk) is a searchable, standards-based catalog of a collection of Scottish Gaelic oral narrative that was developed between 2005 and 2009 with major research funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, http://www.ahrc.ac.uk). It is one of a series of projects begun early in the past decade to make folklore materials in Scotland more widely available to the public through the usage of digital technology. Implicit in such initiatives has been the intention to develop multiple social applications of archived folklore materials; during such development, two primary aspects of the technological applications have been a wider promotion of folklore materials through technology and the enhancement of Scotland's main folklore archives.