Song Type Geography

Click a theme to see its geographic distribution. Click a place for details.

What this map shows

Each dot is a runosong collection place, sized and coloured by how many poems of a given theme (wedding, epic, lullaby, …) were collected there. A poem counts once for each theme it carries. The sizes are raw counts, not adjusted for how much was collected at a place, so they show where a theme was most often written down rather than where it is proportionally strongest.

How to use

• The list on the left leads with the archives’ own categories. Below the divider are the theme groups, which cover the song types no archive category could be established for. A type’s theme comes from the archives’ filing of the type or its songs where there is one, otherwise from words in the type’s name.
• Click a theme in the left list to colour the map by that theme. The dot size then represents the count of that theme at each place.
• Click a place dot on the map to open its breakdown: theme counts, totals, and a link out to the place page.
• The Top Places list ranks places by the currently selected theme.

Themes

• wedding — bride laments, marriage cycles.
• epic — narrative poems (e.g. Kalevala-type material).
• lyric — emotional/personal reflection.
• lullabies / children — cradle and play songs.
• incantations — charms and incantations.
• calendar — seasonal and ritual.
• work / animal / death — labour, herding, lament.

Caveats

Theme tags come from the archives’ filing of each type or its songs, or failing that from words in the type’s name, and are coarse; any given poem may cross themes. Place counts are raw — no per-corpus normalisation — so heavy collection parishes (e.g. Kuusalu, Setumaa, Ilomantsi) dominate by sheer size; switch on Per 1000 poems to see the share instead.

A place's number for a theme is the poems collected there that carry a song type of that theme, so a poem with two wedding types counts once. Every place a song type was recorded at is counted, however small a site it is for that type.