Flashback: Folklore, Place, and Song

In 2022, I had the pleasure of taking Dr. Zoe LeBlanc‘s Intro to DH course. The course required a final group project. My group–composed of Isabella Viega, Loida Pan, Fiona Hartley-Kroeger, and myself–chose to focus on corridos, the traditional Mexican narrative ballad. We wanted to investigate how corridos referenced places, and the places they were associated with, because the genre was so important to Mexican regional, local, and national heritage.

The group project went on to become an Omeka site, open-source dataset, and series of publications. Sadly, the Omeka site is no longer hosted, but you can read about it in Reviews in Digital Humanities. I also still maintain the code and corrido dataset in this GitHub Repository. And we also presented the work at the Global DH Symposium in 2023. Here’s the YouTube recording:

I’ve also continued to maintain the ArcGis map of the corridos. This map considers three metadata definitions for places related to these songs:

• places mentioned in the lyrics (marked by round pins)
• places where these corridos were published in print (marked with + symbols)
• places where they were known to be performed or recorded (marked with thumb tacks)

Here’s the map: