I'm a bit guilty I have neglected this blog for a while (although, rest assured Dr. Foley, I'm still well within the the class requirements.) I've enjoyed this experience quite a bit. But what has vexed me lately is my final project. I was interested in this class because of the fantastic work Dr. Foley has done in utilizing the power of the Internet to its fullest advantage. I think he really gets a lot of what I have been studying (see for example the work of interactivity scholar Sheizaf Rafaeli), and he makes it clear with his theory that the Internet is closer to an oral tradition than a textual one.

What has vexed me, however, is trying to find examples and maybe overextending myself a bit. I wrote about one last week, and that might have been my closest attempt. Other ideas that classmates proposed, such as the orality of instant messaging, show promise, but most of my hare-brained ideas, such as YouTube as oral performance, fall flat. In the end, the best YouTube video or machinima or citizen journalist contribution or even World of Warcraft excursion is by definition a text. They lack the interactive elements that inform reperformance or even dissection and perpetuation that a great epic like the Iliad or the South Slavic epics do.

I'm still puzzling through this conundrum, but I wanted to share a few sites I have found that might fit the bill. I'll probably add to this list later, so please check back. Actually, as a newly educated blogger, maybe I'll just add them to my blog roll. To anyone who reads this and knows anything about oral traditions, poems and epics, please let me know what you think. Am I taking the comparison too far or am I expanding the definition?

Thanks in advance.

I really liked browsing this site on Native American Oral Poetry. I think it could really benefit from ethnopoetics or more multi-media applications, but it's a good collection of tales.

A great historical explanation of the Serbian oral tradition, but how can you explain it without providing actual examples. Heck, they could probably link to the Oral Traditions site.

Leave it to Harvard to create a great background on the oral tradition of Homer, but their multimedia is lacking as well. It's just a couple of classroom videos. (And it uses RealPlayer. Yuck, get with the times. Embed flash videos please, so I don't have to exit my browser.)

Here's a fun site for a performing troupe, but it seems they really do present traditional Bulgarian oral poems. The heroic poems seemed especially fun. I wish I could afford to book them.

I found a couple of interesting slam poetry sites, but I'll list those later. I did want to list this YouTube search, however, to show how many recordings of slam poetry events exist. Maybe that's my "in".

BTW, I didn't quite get this one, but it was my favorite of the ones I watched. It presents a really interesting dicotomy. Who is the poem about - the woman or the dude in the wheelchair?