”When you have read my letter, pass it on!” A Special Means of Communication by a Calvinist Minister Between the Two World Wars in Transylvania

Dezső Bonczidai (1902–1946) was a Calvinist minister in Kide (Chidea, Romania) between 1928 and 1946. From 1932 to 1935 he wrote regularly – every week or every two weeks – a hand-written newspaper of eight pages to the members of his congregation. This newspaper was called A Pastoral Letter. Such a form of communication was unique in Transylvania and also in Hungary at that time, because no similar pastoral activity has been found. The village was very small, consisting only of two streets, with 388 Calvinist believers; and although all of the people had daily connections, the minister chose a new form of communication. The paper examines this particular activity and the text-corpus in the contexts of the Transylvanian Calvinist Home Mission and the status of Hungarians in Transylvania after the Trianon Peace Treaty. The study analyses the author of the texts, his motivations, the ways these were realized in practice, and those settings and expectations in which this mixed genre was born: a newspaper written in the form of a letter. In addition it examines the attitude of the villagers to this new kind of communication, which made its contribution to the Transylvanian rural writing and reading culture

The theoretical, methodological and technical issues of digital folklore databases and computational folkloristics

The study examines the problems and possibilities presented by the digitization of national folklore archives and collections in the wider context of folklore archiving and digital humanities. The primary goal of the study is to present a problem-oriented and critical overview of the available digital databases containing folklore texts (WossiDiA, Sagragrunnur, ETKSpace, Danish Folklore Nexus, Nederlandse VolksverhalenBank, The Schools’ Collection, etc.), and of the analyses conducted on these using computational methods. The paper first presents a historical overview of the conceptualization that went into the creation of folklore databases (genre-centered, collector, and collection-centered approaches), followed by a discussion of the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of digital content creation (crowdsourcing, markup languages, TEI, digital critical editions, etc.). The study then takes a look at the new digital tools and methods applied in the analysis of digitized folklore texts (text-mining, network theory methods, data visualization), and finally places databases and computational folkloristics within a larger theoretical framework

Witchcraft and Demonology – Topics, Methods and Trends in Witchcraft Research in Hungary, 2017

Review on Gábor Klaniczay & Éva Pócs, eds. 2017. Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

Dilemmas of Corpus Construction beyond Folklore Collections

During the corpus-building operation of the Digital Database of Hungarian Verbal Charms we tried to augment the available material by the inclusion of witness statements of witch trials conducted in early modern Bihar County and the town of Debrecen. My paper explores the kinds of dilemmas and issues we were faced with concentrating especially on generic questions of verbal charms. As regards the exploration of early modern written sources of vernacular language use the most relevant recent approaches came from historical speech act research. Therefore, in the context of the corpus building project I shall also discuss to which extends the results of historical pragmatics, historical speech act research can offer any help (and if so, what kind of help) in solving the generic problems and questions of verbal magic