Slides of my presentation on regional variation of Finnic runosongs at the conference "Expressions and Impressions: Aspects of Traditional Singing", 7.-9. Nov. 2018, Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia. After some introducting slides the results of stylometric and network analysis of texts in two Finnic folk song corpora are presented and commented: the division of material into regional groups and regional/stylistic peculiarities of these groups.

1. Regional variation of Finnic runosongs
Mari Sarv – Estonian Folklore Archives of Estonian Literary Museum
„Impressions and Expressions: Conference on Traditional Singing“ – Tartu – 7.11.18
on the basis of word frequencies

2. Variation
• an essential feature of folklore, emerging as a result of folkloric
transmission process, where the transmitted knowledge is constantly
re-created and adapted
• present in various aspects of folklore
• large text corpora enable us to get insight into the essence and details
of variation, tradition flows and regional peculiarities

3. Meter (style) vs. content (typology)

4. Stylometry
• Method for studying variation of texts based on frequencies of
sequences (usually words)
• Most notably used for authorship attribution: every author has
his/her personal style for using most frequent words

5. The structure and evolution of story networks
Folgert Karsdorp, Antal van den Bosch
Published 29 June 2016.DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160071
„Bag-of-words models have proved to
be invaluable for numerous
computational approaches to textual
data, such as text classification, textual
information retrieval and textual
stylometry. Bag-of-words models make
the assumption that maintaining word
order is unnecessary in determining
the relationship between texts.“
„Story networks, defined as non-
hierarchical agglomerations of pre-
textual relationships, represent
streams of retellings in which retellers
modify and adapt retellings in a
gradual and accumulative way.„

6. Tale types Storytellers
(Järv, Sarv in spe)

7. Databases of Finnic runosongs
Estonian Runic Songs' Database
http://www.folklore.ee/regilaul/
The Ancient Poems of the Finnish People
http://skvr.fi/

9. • Lyrical I: North-Estonia, South-Estonia, Ingria &
South Karelia, Finland
• Epic and mythological topics (Väinämöinen - God
of Singing): Karelia
• Home (father, mother, brother, girl): North-
Estonia
• Home (domestic animals): Finland
• Relations of youth (I, you, boy/brother, girl):
Ingria, South-Estonia

10. Acknowledments
• Anthony, L. (2018). AntConc (Version 3.5.7) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available
from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software
• Bastian M., Heymann S., Jacomy M. (2009). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating
networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
• Eder, M., Kestemont, M. and Rybicki, J. (2013). Stylometry with R: a suite of tools. In: Digital Humanities
2013: Conference Abstracts. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE, pp. 487–489.
• Eesti regilaulude andmebaas, http://folklore.ee/regilaul. Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi Eesti Rahvaluule Arhiiv.
• R Core Team (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical
Computing, Vienna, Austria.
URL https://www.R-project.org/.
• SKVR-tietokanta - kalevalaisten runojen tietokanta, http://skvr.fi. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
This study was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (IUT22-4; Folklore in the Process
of Cultural Communication), and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund
(Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies).

11. THE END