What is this page?
This explorer maps the emotional landscape of Finnic runosong across 803 collection places in Estonia and Finland. Each place is scored by how often emotion-bearing words appear in its poems, based on DeepSeek AI analysis of 165,000 poems. The result is a geographic view of where different feelings concentrate in oral tradition.
Emotion domains and families
Emotions are organized into
25 domains (e.g., Love, Grief, Anger, Fear) that group
36 finer-grained families. For example, the Grief domain contains families like mourning, weeping, and bereavement. The left panel lists every domain; click the arrow to expand and see individual families. Selecting a domain or family recolors the map to show only that emotion's distribution.
The choropleth map
Each circle on the map represents one collection place.
Circle size and opacity encode the emotion count: larger, darker circles indicate higher concentrations. The color matches the selected domain or family. When "Overall Emotional Density" is active, the map shows the total emotion word count per place regardless of type.
Normalization: per 1000 poems
By default the map shows raw counts. Enable
"Per 1000 poems" to normalize values, which corrects for the fact that some places have far more collected poems than others. Normalized mode reveals where an emotion is disproportionately common relative to corpus size rather than simply where the most poems were collected.
Minimum poems filter
The
Min poems slider hides places with too few poems, which tend to produce noisy or unreliable percentages. A threshold of 20-50 is recommended for meaningful patterns.
Language filter
Use the
ET / FI / All buttons to show only Estonian (ERAB) or Finnish (SKVR + JR) places, or both. This is useful for comparing emotional patterns between the two traditions.
Place detail and radar charts
Click any circle to open the right panel with that place's full emotion profile. The
radar chart shows the place's score across all 24 emotion domains (excluding "Other"), normalized against the global maximum for each domain. A place that fills a particular axis completely has the highest count in the entire corpus for that emotion. Below the radar chart, a
bar chart lists the top 12 emotions ranked by raw count.
Comparing two places
Shift+click a second place to overlay its radar polygon (shown in pink dashed line) on top of the first. This makes it easy to compare the emotional signature of, say, an Estonian island parish with a Finnish inland area.
Place search
Type at least two characters in the
Find place field to jump to the first matching location and open its detail panel.
Statistics section
Below the map, three cards provide corpus-wide summaries:
- Emotion Hotspots — the top 15 places for the currently selected emotion (updates when you switch domain/family).
- Estonian vs Finnish — side-by-side comparison of emotion rates per 1000 poems in each tradition, revealing which emotions are more prominent in Estonian vs. Finnish runosong.
- Emotional Diversity — places ranked by Shannon entropy of their emotion distribution (minimum 50 poems). High entropy means a wide, even spread of emotions; low entropy means one or two emotions dominate.
Data source
Emotion annotations come from DeepSeek AI analysis of poem content, aggregated at the collection-place level. Place coordinates are from the ERAB, SKVR, and JR metadata. The underlying index (
emotion_place_index.json) contains only place names, numeric counts, and pre-defined domain/family identifiers.