Illinois Wesleyan University Global Storytelling Project
Illinois Wesleyan University Global Storytelling Project
The IWU Global Storytelling Project (GSP) was born out of the need to provide high-quality and authentic teaching materials that were accessible to anyone at any time. The collection was built as an open-source audio collection of stories. Each audio file has been recorded in different languages by volunteer readers.
The map above created by the by the University of Minnesota shows the prevalent languages of the world. Language is however not just about prevalence. It provides a vessel for the preservation of culture, and its impact can be felt by a person not fluent in the language itself. According to the Modern Language Association, a languge is dying every fourteen days. Each time we lose a language, we lose a part of what makes us humans along with it.
In the summer of 2023, the IWU Digital Humanities Fellowship allowed the project to change it's direction towards the creation of a model for the preservation of languages through oral stories and through it, the preservation of culture as well. The project was also expanded to include data on the readers of the stories, and also to contextualize the cultures of the languages spoken for each story.
Preservation of Languages & Cultures Through Oral Stories
Storytelling plays a crucial role in preserving our world’s cultural heritage. Oral traditions, myths, legends, and folktales provide insights into the origins and development of civilizations, their beliefs, and their understanding of the world. Exposure to stories from different cultures fosters intercultural understanding, empathy, and appreciation for diversity. The great ancient civilizations all have their corpus of foundational narratives: from Greek Aesop fables, to the two major Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, India’s Panchatantra, Mesoamerica’s Popol Vuh [The Book of the People] or the traditional European folktales collected in German by the Grimm brothers at the beginning of the 19th century.
Illinois Wesleyan Global Storytelling Collection
The public-facing collection is housed in the Ames Library’s Digital Commons. Each recording has a summary of the story in English, a language geolocator, and an image. The current collection has a total of 22 recordings in 15 different languages: Arabic, Catalan, Euskera, French, Galician, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Sinhala, Spanish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.
As of June 2023, GSP has a total of 1,280 downloads worldwide.
Project Coordinators
- Carmela Ferradáns, Professor of Spanish & Director of International and Global Studies, Illinois Wesleyan University
- Olivia Daoud, BFA Music Theatre '25, Digital Humanities Fellow 2023, Illinois Wesleyan University
- Abhirup Das, BS (Biology & Computer Science) '26, Digital Humanities Fellow 2023, Illinois Wesleyan University
- Lena Turlakova, BA Political Science '25, Digital Humanities Fellow 2023, Illinois Wesleyan University