Photo by V. Miller
Nov. 2, 2005
Telling Stories
Djuha's Sleeve: A Study on the Reliability of the Oral Tradition
Katie Lynn Thompson, 14, St. Clair, Minn.
Finalist, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, 2005
Category: Behavioral and Social Sciences
My project was a study of the reliability of the oral tradition. My experiment was designed to imitate the game of Telephone.
I chose a Syrian folk tale called " Djuha's Sleeve" and told it to one person. I then recorded that person telling the story to someone else. The second person told it to a third person while I recorded it, and so on, until the story had been passed through six people. I used the recordings to track the number of changes that occurred in the story from one version to the next.
As it turned out, none of the final versions of the story were anywhere near the original version.
Based on the results, I can conclude that no one ever listens to or interprets data exactly the same way, so no story ever has been or ever will be told the same way twice.
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