Dear guest of the graffiti webpage!

The database of graffiti, available from March 2013, is one of the results of a joint Estonian and Polish project called Creativity and Tradition in Cultural Communication (Szpila 2012, 2013; Voolaid 2012, 2013b), a project that lasted from 2010 to 2012. My colleague Grzegorz Szpila, from the Jagellonian University in Kraków, and I conducted parallel research concentrating on the use of paremics or proverbial–phraseological elements in Polish and Estonian graffiti and mural writings.

Graffiti is one of many contemporary cultural phenomena making use of proverbs and sayings. Under paremic graffiti I include the graffiti for which the author has used proverbial generalized sayings (including classic proverbs, their modifications or so-called anti-proverbs, proverb parodies) as well as aphoristic quotes, humorous and juicy expressive catch phrases, slogans, and clichés in order to convey his or her message. The paremic nature is indicated by the syntactic formulae of the graffiti texts as well as the purpose of giving meaning to everyday experience. Research on the contact points of graffiti and paremia has previously been carried out internationally from very different perspectives. The connections between graffiti and proverbs have been dealt with from the political perspective (Rolston 1995; Williams 1991; Tillman 1990; Mieder), and graffiti has been observed, primarily, as an abundant source of proverb-parodies in latrinalia, i.e. toilet graffiti (Dundes 1966; Nierenberg 1994). Polish mural wisdom has been studied, from the linguistic, humour-theoretical and other perspectives, by Grzegorz Szpila (2009; 2011), et al. When analysing paremic graffiti I incline towards those researchers (e.g. Permjakov 1971, 1975) who have handled the borders of the paremic rather loosely: apart from collecting the usual proverbial and phraseological units, I have also collected and documented graffiti including short narratives and other short forms of folklore, etc. A paremiological approach to the material brings to foreground textual/verbal graffiti. Mural graffiti usually consists of textual scribblings; however, well-known street artists as well as anonymous graffiti creators often base their visual work on proverbs, proverbial expressions and comparisons. Wolfgang Mieder and Janet Sobieski (1999) have published an international and annotated bibliography on the interrelationship of iconography and paremiology. The studies range from such well-known artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel and Francisco de Goya, to the popular prints on T-shirts, banners, flags, figurines, and also graffiti. Since proverbial metaphors are verbal images, it is no surprise that artists translate these images into various art forms. Thus, it is very important to document all the artwork when collecting graffiti in order to take into account the visual side and to observe in further research how paremic text and the image supplement one another and how this plays a role in understanding the meaning.

The new life of the location-specific graffiti on the Internet In recent years the Internet has played a very big role as the mediator of graffiti. The Internet turns representations of the very local and place-specific graffiti into something that may become rapidly available from anywhere in the world. Several street artists in Tartu who have used paremic texts in their artworks, present their works (mainly under pseudonyms) in blogs. There are many people in Estonia whose hobby is photographing graffiti and posting photos on the Internet in blogs and social media albums. Internet exhibitions are made of graffiti. In both cases graffiti confined to a specific location will become a memic secondary tradition, which may live longer through the Internet and photography and very quickly reach beyond the ‘birthplace’ of a particular graffito. The academic database of graffiti differs from Internet blogs and albums because it is based on the needs of particular researchers. For example the emphasis on the pareomiological aspect of graffiti can be highlighted in a database. In addition to this, search engines enable the researcher to find graffiti by textual parameters, while database contains metadata and folkloristic typology. The database spreads the phenomenon via the Internet, participating in the reproduction of folklore and creation of new cultural meanings. In digital culture graffiti acquires an additional meaning and will become a cultural component, a social text that is shared, sent, posted and re-posted causing further responses and social resonance. Researchers (folklorists, etc.) and also the general public have free access to such databases and thus a folklore database can be handled as public social text that starts its own life and may cause an unexpected reception when the texts it collects and displays fall into a new contexts.

The technical structure of the graffiti database The web interface of the database offers fast access to information and convenient maintenance conditions for the archived documents. Technically, the database text is typed into an MS Excel table. The body of records in text-only format (as a .txt file) relays the data contained to the Estonian folklore server www.folklore.ee where a search feature and type separation are employed to process and display the data on the website. I will outline the basic structure of the database and its underlying principles, giving examples of how an academic database must consider the specific nature of a genre. The technical structure of the database (1) enables the researcher to search for graffito texts within the database, taking into consideration the textual data important from the folkloric perspective (paremic text, archive reference, collector photograph, place and time of collection, subject word) and (2) reflects the potential of the genre’s typological taxonomy. The data are kept in the grafiti_wwwQL database system. The front page gives a short introduction of the project. The page “grafitid” displays a list of graffiti types. The documentary photos were mainly taken by myself, starting in January 2010, centring mainly on the public space of Tartu, which is the second largest city in Estonia (with a population of approximately 100,000), but also elsewhere in Estonia and abroad. In addition, the database includes the few accounts of recorded graffiti in the Estonian Folklore Archives, photos submitted by friends or acquaintances, and by some graffiti collectors.

Search feature

Users can search for records in the database using various attributes:

The analysis of graffiti from a paremic aspect is a somewhat discretional approach to the whole phenomenon as it only considers textual graffiti, which involves utterances in the form of proverbs or in some other sentence-like form. The paremic approach to graffiti as a written multi-modal phenomenon is in itself a narrow one, as it seems to presuppose that the verbal text is extracted from the whole of the work, yet the information conveyed with the help of visual means is often of extreme importance in graffiti, regarding its integral meaning and interpretation. The database provides the text of each graffiti as it appeared in the public space, and its translation either into English or Estonian, depending on the source language. We can also search the texts by topography or collection location – at the moment the locations are predominantly Tartu, but there are some examples from elsewhere. It is possible to get interesting search results when inserting Kärdla (a town in Hiiumaa) in the topography field. In July 2013 it was possible to record paremic recycle bin graffiti in the Kärdla main square. For example, paremic–philosophical sentences were written on recycle bins. Some of those were proverb modifications. Olen alati enda maailma keskpunkt kui ma just endast välja ei lähe ‘I am always the midpoint of my own world, unless I blow a gasket’. Alkohol pole armujook ‘Alcohol is not a love potion’. Kaktus on lihtsalt üks paksuks läinud roos ‘Cactus is just a fat rose’. Kes armastab, see kaua elab ‘The one who loves lives long’. Tööta tööta ongi vähem aega nukrutseda ‘Work work work, then you have less time to be sad’. Ka kulunud saapad jätavad jälje ‘Even scuffed boots leave a trace’. Hirm ei passi põõsas ‘Fear does not hide in a bush’. Mul on palju tegemist pole aega eladagi ‘I have so much to do, I even don’t have time to live’. Näoli maas leiad seemneid tuleviku lillede jaoks ‘When lying flat on your face, you’ll find seeds for the flowers of the future’. The date attribute enables one to search the database by the time of collection. The collector enables one to call up all the texts form one photographer. The names of the photographs or collectors are given using a drop-down menu. The need for the collector field will become obvious when in future we add material from the owners of large graffiti collections and albums. Technique allows one to choose from a list of styles used in graffiti. Most of artworks in the database are freehand or use the stencil technique, but there are also examples of blow-up and sticker technique. Language displays options according to the standard code ISO 639-2. The texts are mainly (70%) in Estonian. The second most frequent language is English (24%), and in third place is Russian with only 2%. This is not surprising as in Tartu the Estonian-speaking population is ca. 75% and Russian-speakers ca. 15%; in addition in Tartu the impact of English on the Estonian, and also on the Russian, youth is strong.

Typological taxonomy

The search, which provides all the identification data of each graffiti, is certainly an indispensable help, although it has its limits. Since the digitized data was already pre-systematized, it was sensible to show the typological taxonomy; a link on the database home page opens the list of graffiti types. More than 400 groups or types of graffiti, formed of variants sharing certain characteristic features, have been determined.

Variants of the same type are grouped under the most characteristic, prototypical text within that type, i.e. the text head. Every type (row) provides the photo, type number/number of graffiti in a given type text head, a translation (where available), place and date of collection and the name of the photographer. Clicking on the type number displays all variants, which can be further zoomed into and include contextual data.

The database attempts to reflect the open nature of a graffito – in the course of communication between different authors, the meaning of a paremic text can be subject to change, therefore long-term observations are a prerequisite to revealing change in the meaning of any specific text. A type consists of all text variants with the same content, photographed in different places.
The database of graffiti is an example of a contact point between the humanities and infotechnology (digihumanities), making the folklore-genre typological collection available on the Internet. The web solution aims to maintain the collected cultural phenomena and to represent it as a systematized folklore collection. Considering the demands of the researcher, statistical data analysis is also offered. The exhaustive body of systematized documents targets both folklorists/culturologists as well as a wider audience with entertainment interests; easy access to the material and English translations enhance the international scholarly efforts irrespective of the user’s physical location.

The common structure and technical implementation of the database allows the keeper to constantly correct, improve and add to the contents, meaning that both the total number of texts as well as the number of types and their representation sizes can be in constant change.