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 fi rst 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 fi nally places databases and computational folkloristics within a larger theoretical framework.

In the article I present an overview of transformations in approaches to textualizing and typologizing folklore texts over the past 150 years using the example of incantations from anthologies to digital databases with a view to highlighting the new horizons digital databases can open up for research. In the first part of the article, I show how the textual characteristics of the incantation genre and the often implicit questions of researchers influenced the textological strategies of classic incantation editions. These primarily typological considerations largely determined subsequent potential interpretations. Using the dimensions of comparability established by Lauri Honko (phenomenology of tradition, the historicity of tradition, and ecology of tradition) I summarize recent attempts at classification by international folklore studies of charms pointing out the pitfalls and shortcomings of typologies as well as the fundamental incompatibility of the different typological conceptualizations. In the second part of the article, after briefly describing the responses of computational folkloristics to the textological, typological and comparatist problems of folklore texts I come to the conclusion that the elaboration of an international guide to textology, standardizing the textualization techniques of digital editions of incantations, would be more important for comparative studies than the creation of further national and international incantation catalogues. To this end and to generate discussion and debate I conclude with the outline of a set of possible multidimensional textological features to be taken into consideration in the creation of future digital databases of verbal charms.

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.1