Moral Ecologies of African Folklore

About the Project

This project is a Django-powered web application that brings a relational database of African folktales to life through interactive dashboards, allowing users to explore theme prevalence, moral framings, and animal-mediated “moral chains.” It leverages SQL-driven analytics—entropy metrics, and co-occurrence networks—and auto-generates up-to-date visualizations directly from the live database. By highlighting bridge narratives and predictive feature insights, it offers a dynamic platform for scholars and educators to interrogate and share the ethical architectures of African storytelling.

Project Gallery

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Figure 1. Ethical Framing Presence by Bridge Status

Figure 3. Normalised Theme Concentration in Central African Animal Stories

Figure 2. Top 10 Themes in Animal-Centred Stories

Figure 4. Ethical Framing of Key Themes by Region

Figure 5. Entropy of Ethical Framing by Theme and Region

Figure 6. Ethical Framing Entropy for Moral Chains by Region

Figure 8. Chi-Square Pearson Residuals for Theme–Region Associations

Figure 9. Normalised Theme Focus Across Regions (Top 15 Themes)

Figure 11. Moral Chain Explorer Dashboard Panel

Figure 12. Connectivity Score by Bridge Status

Interactive Dashboards

Deep dive into themes, ethics, moral chains, and bridge narratives.

Animal Dashboard

Uncover the symbolic meaning of animals. Follow the "moral chain" from an agent like the Tortoise to its associated themes of 'Wisdom' or 'Deception', and discover the specific ethical lessons each combination teaches.

Story Dashboard

Identify the most influential narratives in the corpus. Discover "hub stories" that are rich in moral complexity and visualize the "bridge narratives" that connect different cultures, revealing pathways of moral transmission.

Ethics Dashboard

Investigate the heart of the project's findings. Compare how a single moral theme, like 'Betrayal', is framed through different ethical lenses across Africa, and use the entropy heatmap to pinpoint areas of moral consensus and debate.

Ethics Dashboard_B

Investigate the heart of the project's findings. Compare how a single moral theme, like 'Betrayal', is framed through different ethical lenses across Africa, and use the entropy heatmap to pinpoint areas of moral consensus and debate.

Theme Dashboard

Map the moral landscape of African folklore. Visualize the most prevalent themes across hundreds of stories and explore the "moral clusters" that reveal which concepts, like 'Deception' and 'Cunning', are most tightly linked.

Geographic Dashboard

Explore the geography of folklore. Visualize the density of stories across the continent and create "theme hotspots" to see where specific moral ideas, like 'Stewardship' or 'Community', are most concentrated.

Cultural Group (People) Dashboard

Discover the unique narrative fingerprint of different cultural groups. Select a group, like the Yoruba or the Zulu, to generate their unique "moral profile," revealing the animals, themes, and ethical frameworks that define their storytelling traditions.

Animals Data View

Access a comprehensive, filterable catalog of every animal agent in the folklore corpus. Sort by name or scientific family, and click on any animal to explore its detailed profile and all associated stories.

Stories Data View

Browse the complete collection of folktales. Use powerful filters to search by title, theme, or cultural group, and click on any story to read the full narrative and view its detailed analytical breakdown.