Detecting Multiple Motif Co-occurrences in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Tale Type Catalog: A Preliminary Survey

Abstract

Catalogs project subject field experience onto a multidimensional map which is then converted to a hierarchical list. In the case of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Tale Type Catalog (ATU), this subject field is the global pattern of tale content defining tale types as canonical motif sequences. To extract and visualize such a map, we considered ATU as a corpus and analysed two segments of it, "Supernatural adversaries" (types 300-399) in particular and "Tales of magic" (types 300-749) in general. The two corpora were scrutinized for multiple motif co-occurrences and visualized by two-mode clustering of a bag-of-motif co-occurrences matrix. Findings indicate the presence of canonical content units above motif level as well. The organization scheme of folk narratives utilizing motif sequences is reminiscent of nucleotid sequences in the genetic code.