Place Comparison

What this shows

Two collection places, side by side. For each place you'll see a small map, the stat row (poems, word occurrences, distinct words, entropy, distinct-word share), a distinctive vocabulary list, and a semantic-domain bar chart. The design answers: how does the sung vocabulary of one parish differ from another's?

How the counts are made: the vocabulary index records, for each word, how many poems at a place contain it. A word repeated many times inside one poem therefore counts once, so “word occurrences” means word-in-poem occurrences and not running-text tokens; the distinct-word share is distinct words divided by that figure. The index covers the 29,929 most widespread words and leaves out any word found in fewer than three poems at the place, so both figures describe the indexed vocabulary rather than the full text.

How to choose places

• Pick Place A and Place B from the dropdowns — 803 places are available.
• Use the presets for curated comparisons (Setumaa – Narvusi contrasts Seto with coastal Estonian; Kuusalu – Haljala contrasts neighbouring North Estonian parishes; Uhtua – Setumaa spans a Karelian–Seto cross-tradition; Suistamo – Karkku contrasts Karelian with southwest Finnish.)
• The swap button (↔) flips A and B without losing your selection.

Distinctive vocabulary

When both places have enough text and are similar in size (both ≥ 500 word occurrences, size ratio < 50×), the list shows words statistically overrepresented in one place relative to the other using the log-likelihood ratio (G², p < 0.05). The number next to each word is the relative frequency ratio — e.g. “13.4×” means the word's share of this place's word occurrences is 13.4 times higher here than in the other place; “unique” means it does not appear in the other place at all. Common function words (pronouns, conjunctions, negation) are filtered out.

When one place is very small or the corpora are too asymmetric for a reliable pair comparison, the page falls back to pre-computed TF-IDF distinctive words (each place against all same-language places in the corpus). The header changes from “Distinctive Words (vs other place)” to just “Distinctive Words” to signal this.

Semantic profile

The bar chart shows how much of each place's annotated vocabulary falls into the major semantic domains (body, kinship, nature, emotions, actions, artefacts, …). A place with a big kinship bar but a small nature bar sings mostly wedding and family themes; the reverse might be hunting or work songs.

Caveats

• Small places (few poems) have noisier distinctive-word lists; look at the poem count in the stat row.
• Parish boundaries and names come from the folklore archives; some aggregate multiple villages.
• Pairs from different languages (ET against FI) with similar corpus sizes use pair comparison — most words will show as “unique” since the vocabularies are largely disjoint. Very asymmetric pairs fall back to within-language TF-IDF.