We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Otibeguni Indigenous Storyteller’s Fund 2025 — a 50,000 Taka initiative dedicated to supporting indigenous authors, artists, researchers, and technologists as they bring their ideas to life.

Whether you want to document forgotten folktales, translate ancient songs, produce a Marma-language short film, design an online archive, or create a community podcast — this fund is here to help you tell your story, your way.

🌱 What This Fund Offers

This isn’t just about financial support. At Otibeguni, we understand that turning an idea into reality often requires mentorship, guidance, and networks. That’s why, along with funding, we offer:

• 1:1 proposal support → We’ll help refine your idea into a solid plan
• Creative & technical guidance → From writing and editing to digital tools and artwork
• Professional mentorship → Access to our extended network of experts
• Visibility & impact → We’ll help connect your work to wider audiences, locally and internationally

We want to work alongside you to bring your vision to life.

📅 Key Dates

• Idea submission deadline: 15 September 2025
• Detailed proposal deadline: 31 October 2025
• Project execution: 1 November 2025 to 30 April 2026 (6 months)

✍️ What to Include in Your Proposal

Don’t worry if you’ve never written a proposal before — we’re here to guide you. Your detailed plan doesn’t need to be complicated; it just needs to explain what, where, when, who, and how. Here’s a simple structure:

1. What → What is your idea? Are you making a book, a short film, an archive, a podcast, or something else?

2. Why → Why is this important for your community, your culture, or your audience?

3. Where → Will your project happen in one place, across several villages, or online?

4. When → Your estimated start and end dates. Short projects that can be completed within 3 months are preferred.

5. Who → Who’s involved? List your team members and their roles.

6. How much → A simple budget breakdown: how you plan to use the funds.

   • Example: If you’re documenting Rakhine folktales for 20,000 Taka, ideally 10–15K should go toward collecting, recording, and preserving stories — not just on buying equipment.

Your proposal should also highlight how your project ensures originality and authenticity — we want your unique voice and perspective.

🎯 Keep It Focused and Actionable

We encourage short, actionable projects that focus on collecting or creating original content. For example:

• ✅ Good fit: A three-month project to record Marma folk songs with elders in your village, share them digitally, and produce translations in Bengali.
• ❌ Less likely to be funded: A year-long project needing heavy IT infrastructure without clarity on what content will be produced.

Remember, shorter projects with clear outcomes are more likely to receive support.

💸 How the Funding Works

• The total fund is Tk. 50,000, distributed across multiple projects
• If three projects are selected, we’ll ensure they represent different indigenous cultures
• Partial funding is available if your project is larger — but you must explain how you’ll secure the rest of the funding
• Projects in indigenous languages are encouraged; however, translations or supplementary material in Bengali or English will be given preference
• Live performances, theater, and festivals are welcome — but projects that also create digital materials will be prioritized

🌊 Idea Submission

Your idea doesn’t have to be fully formed to get started. If you’re unsure where to begin, just send us your initial thoughts, we’ll work with you to shape your proposal, and if needed, we can schedule a 1:1 online session to discuss your plan in detail.

Submit your idea by 15 September 2025 Email us at hello@otibeguni.com

When we first launched the Otibeguni website, our goal was simple: to share the beautiful folktales of Bengal with anyone curious enough to read them. At the time, the site was pretty straightforward — a collection of stories and books laid out in clean tables, with links to related content we gathered from around the internet. It was a humble archive — a digital bookshelf where you could wander through Bengali folklore, one tale at a time.

But now, it’s time for something much more ambitious. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working on a new, more interactive platform that’s designed to deepen the way people engage with mythology, history, religion, and culture — not just read stories, but explore the fascinating webs of connections behind them.

This next-generation Otibeguni site will offer:

📍 Stories Told Through Space: StoryMaps

A StoryMap is like a slideshow tied to a real (or imagined) map. Each slide takes you to a new location, showing you the next chapter in a journey.

For example, imagine you’re learning about Shah Jalal, the legendary Sufi saint whose arrival in Sylhet is wrapped in layers of myth and history. A StoryMap could walk you through:

• His departure from Yemen
• The stops he made across the Indian subcontinent
• The dramatic events during the conquest of Sylhet
• The places where his disciples spread his teachings
• Shrines and traditions that trace back to his journey

Each point is not just a pin on a map — it’s a part of the story, complete with text, images, and historical context. This format makes it easier to see how people, ideas, and legends move through landscapes, turning geography into narrative.

🕰️ Stories Told Through Time: Timelines

A Timeline is a sequence of slides organized by date — helping you trace how a place, belief, or idea evolved across history. Take Mahasthangarh, for example — one of the oldest archaeological sites in Bangladesh. A Timeline could show you:

• Its early identity as a Buddhist center of learning
• Its transformation into a Hindu religious site
• Later changes during the Muslim period, with the arrival of saints and new cultural influences Its rediscovery and protection in modern times

Each point could include ancient inscriptions, stories passed down, religious relics, or modern excavations — helping you follow the layers of belief and memory stacked on top of each other over centuries.

🧩 Stories Told Through Interconnections: Topics

We’re also introducing a powerful new feature called Topics — a way to weave together the names, places, deities, and historical events that appear across our archive. Topics are powered by Wikidata, a global knowledge system used by Wikipedia, libraries, and search engines like Google. Each Topic on our site (like Gangadevi, Sylhet, or Mahasthangarh) will be linked to its corresponding Wikidata entry — acting like a digital fingerprint. This means two big things:

Easier for Humans to Explore

Clicking on a Topic will let you:

• See all stories connected to that place, person, or idea
• Discover related maps, timelines, books, and even news articles
• Follow your curiosity across folklore, history, and myth — without getting lost

For example: Curious about Sylhet? You’ll be able to see every tale and presentation that touches that region. Want to explore where Gangadevi appears in our archive? You’ll see her across religious poetry, legends, and sacred rivers.

Easier for Search Engines to Understand

Because we’re using structured data (specifically, Google’s preferred formats for Books, Places, and People), our content will also become more discoverable and better categorized on the internet. In other words, these Topic links will help not just people — but also algorithms — understand how stories, beliefs, and cultures connect. It’s like turning our archive into part of the world’s larger cultural memory, searchable and navigable by anyone.

We’ll be rolling out the new platform in stages over the next few weeks. Along the way, we’ll keep sharing updates, ideas, and behind-the-scenes thoughts here on our blog.

Much of our region’s folklore exists in fragile, hard-to-access forms — handwritten manuscripts, old print editions, and poetry in archaic language. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re using AI across our folklore digitization pipeline to bridge the gap between these historical texts and today’s readers.

Digitization: Enhancing OCR with AI

Many of the books in our archive are over a century old. They’ve been passed through countless hands, often with paper creases, annotations in the margins, and signs of wear that confuse traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools.

To tackle this, we use a two-step AI-enhanced digitization process:

• First, we pass the raw OCR output through a large language model (LLM) to clean up the text — correcting spelling errors, removing scanning artifacts, and standardizing formatting.
• Second, we ask the same model to summarize the cleaned content so that our human reviewers have a clearer understanding of the material when checking the output. This improves both the speed and accuracy of our review process.

Translation: Making Archaic Bengali Accessible

A significant portion of medieval Bengali folklore comes in the form of narrative poetry written in archaic language. Even native speakers today often find it impenetrable without training.

Surprisingly, modern LLMs are proving capable of parsing these dense, poetic texts and reconstructing the gist of the narrative. We use them in two ways:

• To help us interpret the original Bengali stories, giving us a rough understanding of the events, characters, and themes.
• To translate the stories into English and even adapt them into prose retellings. While these AI-generated adaptations aren’t final drafts, they are often good enough to serve as functional plot summaries.

NLP Labeling: Structuring the Folktales

Once a story passes through our digitization and translation pipeline, we run it through another NLP (Natural Language Processing) phase using an LLM. Here, we extract and annotate key structural and cultural elements:

• Genre classification (e.g., creation myth, romantic tragedy)
• Identification of religious and cultural references
• Named entity recognition to tag characters and place names

This labeling makes our archive searchable and linkable in ways that traditional literary archives are not — allowing researchers and creators to find stories with specific themes, characters, or motifs.

Folklore Analysis: Identifying Global Motifs

The final step in our pipeline is what we call computational folklore analysis. Since the mid-20th century, folklorists have worked on classifying global folk narratives into recognizable motifs and tale-types — from trickster patterns to resurrection plots.

We’ve digitized one such motif catalog into a structured database and now use LLMs to:

• Automatically identify common folklore motifs
• Detect patterns across our collection, which in turn helps us trace cross-cultural influences