Research Areas

Folklore, Danish literature, Nordic culture, Old Norse Studies, Culture Analytics, Machine Learning, Network Analysis

Timothy R. Tangherlini is a Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he is the author of Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories (2014), Talking Trauma (1999), and Interpreting Legend (1994). He has published widely in academic journals, including The Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore, Scandinavian Studies, Danske Studier, PlosOne, Computer and Communications of the Association for Computing Machines. He directed the NEH’s Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities with a focus on Network Analysis for the Humanities, and also acted as co-director of the long program on Culture Analytics at the NSF’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). He is interested in the circulation of stories on and across social networks, and the ways in which stories are used by individuals in their ongoing negotiation of ideology with the groups to which they belong. His current research focuses on computational approaches to problems in the study of folklore, literature and culture. In particular, he is developing generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives, and conspiracy theories. With a colleague at Stanford University, he is working on a project leveraging deep learning as a means for tracing influence in K-Pop dance. His research has been supported by grants from the NSF, the NIH, the NEH, the ACLS, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Google. He is a fellow of the American Folklore Society, and a member of the Royal Gustav Adolf Academy (one of the Sweden’s Royal Academies).