Read before they delete it. Why study conspiracy theories as contemporary folklore

Abstract

Efforts to explain how shared folklore ideas such as conspiracy theories work have often stayed halfway, mainly due to difficult orientation in large data sets and insufficiently exacting research approaches taken from the humanities, but surprisingly often the natural sciences. The current methodological procedures of the so-called computer folkloristics, with which this review study presents, may promise some progress in this field.

Keywords

• conspiracy theory
• contemporary folklore
• computational folkloristics
• urban folklore
• digital humanities