Uudised

The closing event of the FILTER project took place on September 3 at the Finnish Literature Society.

The Academy of Finland’s project, FILTER ("Formal Intertextuality, Thematic Networks, and Poetic Variability in the Regional Traditions of Finnic Oral Poetry", 2020–2024) aimed to tackle the complex variation in the vast digital Finnic runosong data using computational methods. The project was led by Kati Kallio and Eetu Mäkelä and combined the expertise in the fields of folkloristics and computer sciences in the collaboration between the Finnish Literature Society, the Helsinki University Centre for Digital Humanities, and the Estonian Literary Museum.

During the project, the team integrated several independent Finnic runosong data collections from Finnish Literature Society and Estonian Literary Museum into one database. In addition to runosongs, the database also includes literary works related to the runosong tradition, such as the Kalevala, Kanteletar, and Kalevipoeg.

In the course of the project a set of methods was developed to computationally identify and analyze common themes, poetry texts, written sources of oral poetry, and distinctive features of local poetry traditions. Combination of humanistic and computational expertises, and continuous experimentation with various methods allowed researchers to tackle many "big," "old," or "wicked" questions of runosong research, as well as to formulate new ones.

One of the key outcomes of the project is the web environment Runoregi (https://runoregi.fi) where browsing the runosong collections is powered by the similarity detection methodology thus enabling to easily access and compare the sets of similar verses, and songs. FILTER visualizations webpage (https://filter-visualizations.rahtiapp.fi/) provides a predefined set of tools to create various maps and graphs on the basis of runosong data.