Informant Explorer
The singers and tradition bearers the archives named — who sang what, where, and when it was written down. The Overview tab explains what the index covers and how names were grouped.
Browse informants
| # | Corpus split |
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Where the singers were recorded
Every place a named informant is filed under, ranked by how many of them the archive records there. This is the same index as the Informants tab, counting only its 31,090 person-name entries: anonymous attributions, group entries and manuscript collections cannot be put on a map as one person in one place. Choose a row to see those people in the Informants tab.
Places ranked by singers
| # | Open |
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The unit is a person-name entry: anonymous, collective and collection attributions are not counted here, which is why a place can show fewer entries than the archive files under it. A singer recorded at two places counts in both. The poem column therefore sums past the number of poems in the index.
The same places on a map
Circle size is the number of person-name entries recorded at that place; every row of the table above is here. Click a circle to see those singers. To watch the places fill up decade by decade, open the Named informants over time tab.
The last decade with a record
Overview
At a glance
Poems per informant
The distribution shows how many indexed informants occur in each poem-count range.
Kinds of attribution
What this index contains
Informants are the people or groups from whom songs were recorded. Collectors gathered and documented the material; informants performed, recited, or otherwise supplied it.
The index uses corpus-specific fields. SKVR supplies free-text informant notes. JR supplies a name field plus context notes. ERAB supplies a name field and also has a separate biography field; biography text is not treated as a name source.
Coverage by corpus
| Corpus | Source field | Poems with name | Poems in corpus | Source non-empty | Non-name notes | Coverage |
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Exclusions and accounting
KR is excluded because its informant field contains descriptions of published works rather than informant names. The site-wide comparison total on this page therefore covers the non-KR corpora only.
JR rows carrying its restricted-information placeholder are excluded. The current index records such rows.
Values that describe dates, provenance, archival sources, or other non-name notes are excluded and counted separately for each corpus. Anonymous bearers, groups, and named collections remain in the index with category labels.
What "People" means here. The archive's informant field is free text, and it does not always hold a name: it may hold a village heading, a note on how the collector came by the song, or a label for the kind of text. Those are removed by hand, corpus by corpus — of them so far, most recently the village headings that stood alone where no singer was written down. What remains under People is a value that reads as a personal name, which is not the same as a verified person. A bare surname may belong to the collector rather than the singer, and a farm name and a family name can be the same word. Sorting by Years and reading the oldest records is the quickest way to see the difficult cases: before about 1815 the archive rarely recorded who sang.
Honest accounting: the build partitions source-bearing records into accepted attributions, restricted JR rows, non-name notes, empty-source cases, and unresolved display identifiers. These categories are checked against each corpus total before publication; they are not silently discarded.
Names and identity
Grouping is by the cleaned name string, after a review of the names that looked like duplicates. Where the archive recorded one bearer under several spellings, those entries were folded together and the best-attested archival form kept as the display name. The review merged spellings into entries, and removed values that turned out to be place headings, archival cross-references, or collecting notes rather than bearers.
A further attributions named more than one singer — "X ja Y" — and were pseudo-people in the old index. Each now credits its poems to every singer it names, so those poems appear under each of them.
Merging is deliberately cautious. Entries differing in the given name, or sharing only a surname and a parish, were left separate even where one person is possible; a bare given name was never merged across parish boundaries. Uncertain cases were left as they stand rather than resolved by guesswork.
Every place an entry is filed under is stored with the number of poems attested there, most frequent first; the Top place column shows the first of them, and an expanded row lists them all. entries are filed under more than one place and under none. Years are the collection years the index retained; entries have none, and an entry recorded in several separate years stores each of them.