Paper short abstract:

The FILTER project brings together Estonian and Finnish folklorists, computational scholars and two national corpora to explore the variation of historical oral tradition. The paper introduces the development of various interfaces, and the research planned and performed during the project.

Paper long abstract:

In the 19th–20th century Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Finland, alliterative tetrametric runosong tradition was collected in great amounts, archived and typologised. From the late 20th century on, the Estonian and Finnish collections have been digitized into two databases. Although there have always been tight connections and discussions among the runosong researchers, the research has mostly been divided into national research traditions, each one dealing with a separate, mostly language-specific material.

In the current collaborative FILTER project (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/filter-project/), we have brought together two voluminous data collections tp the corpus of c. 250 000 poetic texts. That enables us for the first time to access the runosong tradition as a coherent whole, to explore it in the large scale, to discover the minor details with the help of computational means and to focus on the genres and regions that have not received much attention earlier. Along the project span of four years we intend to search new ways to analyse the large corpus, intertwining methods of close and distant reading and taking into account the biases and problems of the data..

In the project, the idea is to develop new approaches according to the needs of the humanistic researchers and possiblities known by and invented with the computational scholars. We are not developing any single master tool, but rather creating a network of new and pre-existing tools that help to respond to various humanistic research questions. The paper introduces the various interfaces developed for runosong research and research results obtained thus far.