On the Principles of a Digital Text Corpus: New Opportunities in Working on Heroic Epics of the Shors

This essay discusses the main principles of a Digital Text Corpus initiated in 2011 with support from the Department of Northern and Siberian Studies at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. With special focus on the vast Shor (a Turkic people in the south of Western Siberia) materials, the essay showcases how this Corpus offers unique and varied means for analyzing folklore texts in lesser used, mostly endangered Siberian languages.