This map shows where the runosong oral tradition had the most diverse vocabulary. Larger, darker circles = richer vocabulary.
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” below means word-in-poem occurrences and not running-text tokens. The index covers the 29,929 most widespread words and leaves out any word found in fewer than three poems at the place, so every metric here describes the indexed vocabulary rather than the full text.
Shannon Entropy: Information-theoretic measure of word distribution diversity. Higher = more diverse vocabulary with more even word usage.
Vocabulary Size: Number of distinct words attested at each place.
Distinct-Word Share: Distinct words / word occurrences. Higher = more varied vocabulary for the amount collected. Note: the share falls as a collection grows, so compare places of similar size.
Evenness: Entropy / max possible entropy. Measures how evenly vocabulary is distributed (vs. dominated by few words).