Formulaic intertextuality, thematic networks and poetic variation across regional cultures of Finnic oral poetry (FILTER 2020–2024)

FILTER project (Formulaic intertextuality, thematic networks and poetic variation across regional cultures of Finnic oral poetry) created new tools and perspectives for the analysis of the wide historical corpus Estonian-Karelian-Ingrian-Finnish runosongs (regilaul, runolaulu, Kalevalaic poetry) with the main emphasis on thematic and poetic variation and intertextuality at the level of line types.

Currently, the digital runosong text corpora in Finland and Estonia contain approx. 250,000 texts relating to a similar poetic tradition of various genres in six Finnic languages. We tested and created digital tools and perspectives for this challenging and varying material, aiming at interlaying close and distant reading, qualitative and quantitative perspectives.

Our tools are also open for other users. Runoregi interface lets the user explore and close read the results of the similarity calculation of the whole material, making it easier to find similar lines, passages and texts. Text and metadata search interface Octavo allows complex and flexible searchers. Runoregi verse clusters and results of manual queries can be projected onto map and genre distribution plot in Visualizations. Please ask for guidance if you need any! Our methods, workflows and codes are also open. You can find links to these in our project home page.

Building on the results and tools of the FILTER project, we continue the work in the new project Variation of content and form of Finnic oral poetry in relation to linguistic and ethnic histories (IKAKE) funded by the Kone Foundation (2024–2028).

FILTER was a consortium funded by the Research Council of Finland at the Finnish Literature Society (PI Kati Kallio) and at the Digital Humanities department of the University of Helsinki (PI Eetu Mäkelä) in close collaboration with the Estonian Folklore Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum in 2020–2024. The research group included the researchers Jukka Saarinen, Liina Saarlo, Mari Sarv, Maciej Janicki and Antti Kanner as well as the research assistants Jakob Lindström and Mirjami Sipilä, and Sakari Korpikallio from the REFOP project.

Read more about the starting points of the project in the Folklore Fellows Network article Historical Oral Poems and Digital Humanities.

Janicki, Maciej & Kati Kallio and Mari Sarv and Eetu Mäkelä. 2024. Runoregi: A User Interface for Exploring Text Similarity in Oral Poetry. Proceedings of the 8th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference 6(1):[4 pages]. https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.11523

Mäkelä, Eetu, Kati Kallio & Maciej Janicki 2024. Sources and development of the Kalevala as an example for the quantitative analysis of literary editions and sources. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications 6(1):[12 pages] https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.11517

Helgadóttir, Yelena Sesselja & Maciej Janicki: Text Clustering of Icelandic Post-Medieval Þulur: Explorations Using the Runoregi Interface. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications 6(1): [1–9]. https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.11516

Sarv, Mari & Kati Kallio & Maciej M. Janicki. 2024. Arvutuslikke vaateid läänemeresoome regilaulude varieeruvusele: “Harja otsimine” ja “Mõõk merest”. Keel ja Kirjandus, 67(3), 238–259. https://doi.org/10.54013/kk795a2

Kallio Kati, Maciej Janicki, Eetu Mäkelä, Jukka Saarinen, Mari Sarv & Liina Saarlo 2023: Eteneminen omalla vastuulla: Lähdekriittinen laskennallinen näkökulma sähköisiin kansanrunoaineistoihin. Elore 30(1): 59–90. https://doi.org/10.30666/elore.126008

Janicki, Maciej & Kati Kallio & Mari Sarv 2023: Exploring Finnic written oral folk poetry through string similarity. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38 (1): 180–194. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac034

Sarv, Mari & Kati Kallio & Maciej Janicki & Eetu Mäkelä 2021: Metric variation in the Finnic runosong tradition: A Rough Computational Analysis of the Multilingual Corpus. In: Petr Plecháč, Robert Kolár, Anne-Sophie Bories, Jakub Říha (Ed.). Tackling the Toolkit. Plotting Poetry through Computational Literary Studies. Prague: Institute of Czech Literature CAS, 131−150. http://doi.org/10.51305/ICL.CZ.9788076580336.09

Janicki, Maciej 2022: Optimizing the weighted sequence alignment algorithm for large-scale text similarity computation. In M. Hämäläinen, K. Alnajjar, N. Partanen, & J. Rueter (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, pp. 96–100. https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4dh-1.13/

Kallio, Kati & Maciej Janicki & Eetu Mäkelä & Mari Sarv 2022: Recognizing intertextuality in the digital corpus of Finnic oral poetry: experiment with the Sampo cycle. In: Karl Berglund, Matti La Mela & Inge Zwart (eds.): Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022). CEUR Workshop Proceedings 3232: 279–287. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3232/paper26.pdf