The SocTales project is a three-year research initiative designed as a preparatory stage for a renewed application to the ERC Advanced Grant, continuing the scientific ambitions of the original five-year SOC-TALE project. It focuses on examining the ideological and cultural-mnemonic functions of fairy tales in socialist Europe, replacing the development of a large-scale tool for the automatic detection of fairy-tale types and motifs with an innovative interpretive methodology of conceptual mapping. This methodology connects analysis on three levels macro (cultural narratives), meso (political concepts), and micro (motifs) and is grounded in the theoretical foundations of semiotics, conceptual history, and memory studies. Special attention is devoted to multimodal analysis, which treats textual and visual elements on equal terms to reveal how illustrations and texts jointly construct ideological meaning. At the core of the project is the creation of a digitized, annotated corpus of selected socialist childrens magazines and book series, such as Ciciban and Čebelica, on which methodological approaches will be tested and pilot analyses of selected fairy tales and illustrations will be conducted. Based on this work, the project will develop a theoretical-methodological framework, carry out pilot studies and comparative analyses of selected fairy tales, and prepare a strengthened ERC application, while also contributing to the advancement of interdisciplinary approaches in the study of fairy tales, cultural narratives, and collective memory.