This repository is for Digital Humanities Hackathon 2018 in Helsinki
Despite the numerous dimensions of the written word, our communication has always been and still remains mainly oral. This group approaches and tackles the methodological challenges of orally transmitted literature through the oldest and most prominent Finnish example: the Death-Psalm of Bishop Henry (Piispa Henrikin surmavirsi), describing the murder of the semi-legendary apostle of Finland in the mid-12th century but written down only centuries later.
Our group is the first to combine the humanities and computational approaches to study the Death-Psalm. The sources we are studying have been of paramount interest in Finnish scholarship since the late 18th century. Basically, every new piece of information can lead to important new insights. Our research questions include:
- Comparison of the contents of the sources using computational methods
- Search for intertextual links from other traditions
- Shaping the history and development of the tradition, including visualizations
- Dating the source versions using language (comparison to other, dated corpora)
- he mechanics of change: features easily transformed / left out / added
We deal with a real-life data set and aim to contributing to solving age-old questions. The data set is relatively small, consisting of just c. 19 various sources, mostly written down in the 17th and 18th centuries. The set of sources is rather versatile, some of them being in verse, some in prose, and the languages containing old Finnish, old Swedish, and Latin. The sources can be roughly divided into two categories:
- versions of the actual Death-Psalm
- sources related to various aspects of the veneration of St Henry, obviously containing information about the same tradition as the Death-Psalm (much variation from a whole Latin legend to short poems).