Pablo Picasso, Don Quixote, 18" X 14", Lithograph.

Proppian Structural Analysis and XML Modeling

Overview

The beginnings of this project lay with my insight that Propp's "functions," the fundamental units of a Russian magic tale plot (AT 300-450), were analogous to metadata, and as such renderable by hierarchically arranged "elements" in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. This idea was precipitated in part by the debate in Humanities Computing (HC) concerning the Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects (OHCO) hypothesis, which argues that texts are comparable to data trees without remainder (see Renear 1996 for discussion). In principle my idea was that a morphological analysis of narrative implemented in XML would be a promising candidate to provide an illuminating angle onto this issue. To this end, I developed an XML application based on Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928), called Proppian fairy tale Markup Language (PftML). PftML utilizes a Document Type Definition (DTD) to create a formal model of the structure of Russian magic tale narrative and to help standardize the tags throughout the corpus. I turned to a subset of the same Russian language corpus from which Propp drew, since it allows for an empirical test of the conclusions of Propp's initial analysis against the original data.

In my current research, I am using PftML to explore data structures (e.g. embedding, repetition, sequencing, etc.) latent in natural language narratives, such as Russian magic tales, in searching for unexpected correlations between functions, and in developing an alternative system of folktale classification (from the Aarne-Thompson) based on Propp's work.

What is XML?

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a meta-markup language. A meta-markup language is a language that can be used to describe new markup languages. Unlike HTML, XML has no fixed vocabulary or syntax. By contrast, the vocabularies (XML "Elements") and syntax (in EBNF notation) utilized in XML documents may be created through the use of either a DTD (see PftML DTD, for example) or an XML schema. In the late 90's, XML was derived from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and preserves many useful and powerful features of its parent markup language, such as DTDs, descriptive markup and hardware/software platform independence of data, though it is much cheaper and less cumbersome to use. Created to describe the hierarchical patterns of data, it is thus well-suited to the sophisticated forms of analysis applied in corpus linguistics, bioinformatics, aeronautic documentation systems and other domains of academe, medicine, and industry. Since the formal nature of Propp's ideas lends itself so readily to the formal nature of XML modeling, scholarly activity such as this could provide powerful structural insights that are inapparent to the eye of an unaided human reader, however scrupulous.

Who was Propp?

Vladimir Iakovlevich Propp (1895 - 1970) was a Russian folklorist loosely affiliated with Russian Formalism (see Ehrlich 1955), a literary movement in the 10's and 20's of the last century which sought to uncover the "devices" (priemy) which lend to the "literary" its unique substance, thereby differentiating itself from other linguistic utterances. Propp studied Germanic philology at St. Petersburg University and then taught languages in secondary schools for some time after the October Revolution. Extracurricular reading of East Slavic (Ukrainian, Great Russian, White Russian and Ruthenian) folklore, a field Propp felt was neglected in his country, combined with his passions for literary theory (current at the time was that of Veselovsky, father of the field of comparative literature, and Formalism) and the morphological writings of J. W. v. Goethe, brought this scientist to the conclusions he reached in his most highly acclaimed work. In 1928, Propp published his widely influential treatise on the devices of narrative, the Morphology of the Fairy Tale, which sparked intense interest in the structural features of narrative texts, among other modes of cultural production. In the Morphology, Propp treats a corpus of 100 tales in Afanas'ev's collection and discovers basic recurrent units of the magic tale plot ("functions") and the ars combinatoria employed implicitly to arrange them. Propp's original goal with his early work was to derive a morphological method of magic tale classification, based on the arrangements of "functions," just as one would place a living organism within a particular taxon based on the rhythm of its parts. It is the author's contention that had Propp been living today, he would have employed XML technology in his researches. In short, Vladimir Propp in the humanities made a parallel accomplishment to that of Robert Oppenheimer working in the hard sciences: the latter split the atom, the former split the narrative.