Folklore represents ways of thinking, living and being, encompassing traditional beliefs, social networks and the circulation of stories through a variety of channels, digital and analogue. It includes both the living and the dead, connected through networks of different kinds. At its core, is the vernacular and everyday: the quotidian narratives that help sustain networks and make up local culture. This project explores the relationship between folklore and digital technology. The central question of this project is what place, if any, in a time of regional and global integration, technological modernization, and national strategies that extend beyond modernity, folklore has in Southeast Asia and what is its meaning and future trajectory. This leads to the question of what form Southeast Asian folklore takes and its relation to tradition and local knowledge. Our initial contention is that technologies, digital and analogue (such as the mobile phone, the television and the typewriter) occupy the locus of stories and experiences that are antagonistic towards notions of modernity and reason. The project addresses three lines of inquiry.

1. Form and content or the state of folklore: Where is folklore to be found, what is its extent and how it is represented? What are the typologies for folklore, in terms of circulation (e.g. Internet, oral, written), time (e.g. traditional, contemporary), place (e.g. rural, urban), genre (e.g. ghost stories, parables), situatedness (e.g. in conversation), forms of use (e.g. talk), purpose (e.g. to instruct, to preserve) and register (e.g. high culture, vernacular)? How do such digital media and networks relate to folklore (e.g. are they antagonistic)?

2. Context or forces affecting folklore: What factors and forces contribute to the creation and evolution of folklore, what are their consequences and which actors (e.g. the living, digital technology) are implicated?

3. Function with regard to the 'place' of folklore: Cutting across questions (1) and (2), which populations engage with folklore and why? To what extent can folklore be considered a traditional form of knowledge? How are individuals, collectives and societies imagined and sustained through the persistence of folklore and how do digital media and networks play a role? What can such media and networks inform us about how people are conceived, in particular with regard to their mortality?

The first line of inquiry is concerned with locating folklore, its forms and its presence and circulation. The second line of inquiry centres on how forces like development and modernisation have impacted the landscape of societies. This question centres on the impact of policies and societal forces and a developing relationship between architectures that have a particular situated meaning. The third line of inquiry probes how folklore can be considered a form of knowledge, cultural form and political commentary and how it is informative about social relations and individual beliefs. It also considers how the convergence of contemporary, interleaving technologies and traditional beliefs represent, envisage and describe people (e.g. as having agency, as being of a certain ethnicity) in relation to folklore. Throughout the three questions we take the position that rather than folklore being located, driven and performed distinctly from digital technologies it is threaded through and transformed through them in a process of mediation and remediation.