Song Type Explorer

About Song Types

Runosong types are scholarly classifications of poems by their content and function. The Finnish SKVR corpus assigns type labels (runotyypit) to 98.6% of its poems, and the Estonian ERAB corpus has type labels (laulutüübid) for 65.5% of its poems. Types include incantations, lullabies, epic narratives, wedding songs, and many more. The English names are AI contextual translations of the original type names, with manual corrections.

How to Use

Search for types by name or English translation. Filter by language (Finnish/Estonian) and theme category. Click a type to see its geographic map, temporal distribution, co-occurring types, and sample poems. Sort by frequency, alphabetically, or by geographic concentration.

Geographic Concentration (HHI)

The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index measures how concentrated a type is geographically. Low values (near 0) mean the type is widespread across many places; higher values mean it was collected primarily in a few areas.

END Association

END (Emotion Neighbourhood Density) measures how much a song type's vocabulary co-occurs with emotion lexicon items across the corpus. A high END score means the type's characteristic words tend to appear in poems that also contain many emotion words. This does not directly measure emotional intensity — incantation and healing types may score high because their vocabulary (body parts, ailments) overlaps with the emotion word list. Scores are language-adjusted (compared against same-language baselines) so Finnish and Estonian types are comparable.

Data Source

Song type labels come from SKVR metadata (Finnish) and ERAB metadata (Estonian). Types are shown in their original language; the English names are AI contextual translations of those names, with manual corrections.

The type names and classifications come from the archival SKVR and ERAB catalogues; the English type names are AI translations (with manual corrections).

List and Tree Views

Use the List / Tree toggle to switch how types are shown. List is a flat, sortable view of every matching type. Tree arranges types under the original archive catalogue hierarchy (the SKVR, ERAB and JR typologies), so you can browse by family rather than by name. Your language, theme and search filters apply to both views. Tree view is available in the All, Finnish and Estonian lists; it is turned off for type groups.

Clusters View

The Clusters view — the one you land on when you open this page — is a zoomable bubble map that arranges the song types into 174 broad families and 3,577 finer groups of near-identical or closely related songs. Each large bubble is a family; the smaller bubbles nested inside it are its groups. Click a bubble to zoom in, click a group to list the individual types it holds, and click any type to open its full detail. Captions sit centred on the bubbles roomy enough to hold them; smaller bubbles stay uncaptioned to keep the map readable, but hovering over any bubble shows its name and how many types it contains. To pinpoint a particular cluster — including the many too small for a caption — use the Find a family box beside the map: type or pick a name and its bubble flashes and zooms into view. Clicking an on-map caption flashes its bubble too, so the link between a name and its circle is always unmistakable. The Labels switch reads the captions in English or Estonian, and the language buttons dim the families that are only Finnish, only Estonian, or a mix of both. The filter buttons above the map work here too: they light up the groups holding at least one song type that matches the choice, and the families those groups belong to.

When a filter is on, a group in which only some song types match the choice is drawn pale. Its bubble fills from the bottom like a glass: the height of the fill shows what share of the group’s types match. A thin band at the bottom of a bubble means that only one or two of many types match; a group in which every type matches stays fully coloured. The list beside the map then starts with the families (and, inside a family, the groups) that hold the most matching song types. The number after each name still counts all their types.

How the clusters were built

The grouping is computed, not hand-curated. For every pair of song types we combine six signals — how alike the English translations of the two type names are, similar poems, shared verses, appearing together in the same poems, the cross-corpus bridge, and shared semantic category — into a single connection strength, and keep the strongest connections (332,601 of them) as a network. A community-detection algorithm (Leiden) then finds the tightly connected groups, and bundles those into the 174 broad families. Of these groups, 1,730 are cross-corpus: they hold ERAB types as well as types from SKVR, KR or JR. In 1,609 of them the links across the corpora rest only on the English translations of the type names, which mark at most a shared theme, not the same song. Each group was then given a plain-language Estonian and English name by a panel of AI language models, and the loosest and largest groups were re-checked by a second, skeptical panel before publication. The grouping is a fresh computational reading of the corpus, so it complements — rather than replaces — the original archive typologies in the Tree view.

Theme Distribution

The bar chart above the list shows how many poems fall under each theme category. Click a bar to filter the list down to that theme.

The theme comes from the archives’ filing of the type or its songs where there is one, otherwise from words in the type’s name.

Semantic Categories

In a type's detail view, this section shows which "semantic worlds" the type's vocabulary belongs to — for example body parts, nature, or kinship — based on an analysis of the words that recur in its poems. Each category links through to a fuller comparison, and the sample words link to the word lexicon.

Genre Cross-Reference

For Estonian (ERAB) types, the detail view can show the archive's own genre classifications (genre, song category and function) for the poems in that type. Only ERAB poems carry this metadata, so the section does not appear for Finnish-only types.

Keyboard Shortcuts

/ — Focus search box
j or ↓ — Select next item in list
k or ↑ — Select previous item in list
Enter — Open selected item
r — Pick random type from filtered list
s — Share URL (copy to clipboard)
x — Export CSV
? — Toggle this help panel
Escape — Clear search / close help