Toldrelated

Toldrelated is a proposed metric and concept used in narrative studies and computational linguistics to quantify the degree of linkage between a told narrative and content that is related but not identical, such as motifs, themes, events, or cross-media adaptations. It is often described as a way to measure how closely retellings or parallel narratives align with source material or with related topics within a corpus.

Etymology and scope: The term blends told, referring to narratives that are narrated or retold, with related, indicating connections to adjacent content. In practice, toldrelated is applied to analyze relationships among texts across genres, languages, or media, including folklore, oral history, literature, and digital storytelling.

Methodology: Calculations typically rely on natural language processing techniques. Texts are converted into embeddings using transformer-based models or topic representations, and similarity or relation scores are computed between a primary told narrative and related items. Graph-based approaches, motif alignment, and event co-occurrence analyses may be combined with embedding similarity to produce a toldrelated score.

Applications: The concept is used in folklore archives, oral history projects, comparative literature, and media studies to study retellings, adaptation patterns, and cross-cultural transmission. It supports identifying core motifs that persist across versions and distinguishing idiosyncratic details from common thematic content.

Limitations and status: Toldrelated is not a standardized metric and its definitions vary by study. It depends on corpus quality, language, and model biases. The term remains field-specific, and clear methodological documentation is essential when applying it.

See also: semantic similarity, narrative analysis, motif detection, retellings.