E-lore provides some additional challenges to the folklorist, beyond those of the more typical "face-to-face" situation in which folklore is exchanged and collected. The most significant differences are in terms of context and methodology, and since e-lore is just beginning to be widely studied and theorized, it's necessary to explain some of my own choices regarding these issues.

Not sure what "e-lore" even is? Click here.

Content:

First, though, I should note that some of the material in this archive may be objectionable to some readers. Much of the material that circulated after the attacks was decidedly racist, xenophobic, and--in my opinion--just plain tasteless. A good bit of it also includes language that some may find offensive. My rationale for archiving this material stems not from my own support of the political views some of it expresses; in fact, I'm deeply offended by many of these items.

I should also note that by no means is this archive exhaustive or complete, nor is it intended to be. I've only included items that I personally received between September 2001 and February 2002. Other items may be added later to be more widely representative, but in the interest of staying "near context," I have not included items that I found at random.

However, the folklore of current events, especially that which circulates electronically, is incredibly ephemeral. Most people who receive these items look at them briefly and either forward them on to someone else or delete them immediately. Few people save them, and even fewer try to save all of them or document them in some way. It's important that these things be collected and archived somewhere, however, even though it's impossible to create a comprehensive archive, or one that accurately documents the history of a single item's transmission.

Collectively, the e-lore that circulated after September 11th helps us understand the variety of ways people were attempting to cope with the events, and how the "folk" response changed over time--from the somber messages of the first days afterwards, to the more militant and aggressive messages during the period between the attacks and the start of the "War on Terrorism," to the more "comic" (if you see them that way) messages of later in the fall. As of the time I began compiling this archive, in February 2002, I had received no new e-lore about the attacks or the war in several weeks, indicating, again, how short-lived this material tends to be, and how vital it is to collect it when it appears.

Methodology:

While fieldwork methods for collecting more "traditional" kinds of folklore are well-established (though not by any means static), the differences between e-lore and face-to-face folklore have created some controversy about how it is best collected.

Folklorists always hope to collect folklore in its "natural context," and to be able to document as many details of its performance as possible. The dominant mode of folklore theory for the past thirty years or so, "performance theory," posits that every event in which folklore is exchanged constitutes a performance, and that only by analyzing the details of a specific performance can we begin to understand the folklore's meaning.

Obviously, this theory runs into some difficulties in the study of e-lore: where does the "performance" happen--when the person forwarding the message hits the "send" command? When they type in an introduction or comment at the top of the message? When the person receiving it opens and reads it? Or at all three moments, and probably more? What is the "context" in which the folklore is exchanged when that transmission happens electronically?

I believe that in order to understand e-lore, we have to draw on larger and more subtle notions of context: while we may not be able to observe contextual details like facial expressions, gestures, and so forth, as we would in a face-to-face performance, e-lore still has a context. However, the context is more implicit, based on our understanding of the person or group list from which we receive the message, and what we know about our relationships with that person or that group.

Additionally, with the kind of material represented in this archive, it's important to take into account the larger cultural and historical contexts in which the materials are being exchanged. What's going on that makes this kind of stuff available for transmission, and "worthy" of transmission? Such questions do run the risk of creating gross generalizations, but they need to be answered.

Finally, there's been an enormous debate among folklorists who collect e-lore about how to represent these "texts" when we collect and archive them. Some believe that all headers and other information about where the message has been before should be included, and argue that leaving that stuff out alters and misrepresents that material. "Editing" e-mail texts, they argue, is no different than "editing" fieldwork transcriptions--a huge no-no.

In this archive, however, I've chosen to leave out such information (except for information about whom I first received each message from, and when) for both practical and theoretical reasons:

• Including all of that information consumes a lot of space on a website, and it's information that most people find distracting and unhelpful.

• While I have obtained permission to use their names from the people who sent me these messages directly, I have not received permission to publicize the names and e-mail addresses of the other people whose personal information appeared in headers in the messages. To post that stuff without obtaining the permission of the people listed would breach the fundamental rules about full disclosure and confidentiality that form the basis of fieldwork ethics.

• Some have argued that including that information allows us to trace the circulation history of any given piece of e-lore, and perhaps to better understand its creation and transmission. But while you may be able to trace the progression of the specific copy of the message you received, that doesn't mean that what you see represents the history of the piece of e-lore as a whole. At any given moment, there are probably thousands upon thousands of copies circulating through countless trajectories; the headers on the message you receive only indicate where that particular copy has been. Also, at any moment along the way, someone may have edited or altered the headers themselves; what appears on your screen is likely an incomplete record of where even this copy of the message has been.

• As such, including such information ultimately doesn't add much to our understanding of the e-lore itself, except in very rare cases (as in the messages circulated among Tama Dean-Greenhagen's husband's coworkers, who all work for the defense industry). To spend a lot of time trying to trace the transmission of the e-lore is to try to resurrect the Historic-Geographic method for the electronic age. It didn't work as a tool for specifying the movement of items through oral transmission, and it won't work any better for tracking the movement of items through electronic transmission.

Representation of texts:

It's impossible to post these e-mail items online and have them "look," in terms of layout, exactly as they did in the original e-mail message, and at any rate, the message likely would have looked different in different e-mail programs anyway. I have scrupulously avoided altering the actual texts of these messages, however. The e-mail texts in this archive are reprinted, in almost all cases, exactly as I received them, including all their original spelling errors, grammar problems, and so forth. Only when I felt the meaning of the text would be unclear without such changes did I correct spelling, punctuation, or other typos (and even this I did rarely). Under no circumstances did I alter or edit the content of the texts themselves, aside from editing out some of the headers and .sig files, as explained above).