To enable effective querying of the ballad databases I have had to assign each ballad a unique, arbitrary, standardized title and a randomly selected, unique number. Only in this way can the software identify all versions of any given ballad. These conventions are not meant to suggest that the numbers and titles used herein are in any way more valid or constitute any sort of improvement over the various conventions developed by others to identify and catalog the poetic materials of the Pan-Hispanic Ballad tradition. As a result of my years of collaboration with the Seminary Menéndez Pidal, where I designed the first electronic databases for the ballad projects of the eighties and early nineties, the current project maintains, whenever possible, the same numbers, keys, and titles as those in use at the SMP since 1980.

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Email: petersen@uw.edu