Maths Meets Myths: Quantitative Approaches to Ancient Narratives

Preface.- Foreword.- Introduction.- Cognitive and Network Constraints in Real Life and Literature.-  A Networks Approach to Mythological Epics.- Medieval Historical, Hagiographical and Biographical Networks.- Peopling of the New World from data on distributions of folklore motifs.-  Phylogenetics Meets Folklore: Bioinformatic Approaches to the Study of International Folktales.- Analyses of a VirtualWorld.- Ghostscope: Conceptual Mapping of Supernatural Phenomena in a Large Folklore Corpus.- Complex Networks of Words in Fables.- Analysing and Restoring the Chronology of the Irish Annals.-  Mapping Literate Networks in Early Medieval Ireland Quantitative Realities, Social Mythologies?.- How quantitative methods can shed light on a problem of comparative mythology: The myth of the struggle for supremacy between two groups of deities reconsidered.

"For the folklore scholar interested in the digital humanities, this collection offers a window into the realm of statistical physics, and demonstrates new techniques that can enhance folkloristic understanding of culture at scale. While written towards the mathematically inclined, Maths Meets Myths remains accessible because the chapters are not overwhelmingly bogged down by mathematics or statistics." (David Chartash, Folklore, Vol. 130 (3), 2019)