ethnomusicology
subject field
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Tunes of the World map: Exploring Estonian and Ukrainian Folk Song Heritage
The project aims to create an interactive digital map for exploring Estonian and Ukrainian folk-song traditions through geographical, thematic, emotional, and structural perspectives. Developed during the HUM Hackathon 2026. The current prototype focuses primarily on Ukrainian folk-song materials, while future versions will integrate Estonian datasets and enable cross-cultural comparison. The workflow combines digital humanities methods, natural language processing, cultural heritage data management, and interactive visualisation. Two large folk-song corpora 85,550 Estonian songs and 56,726 Ukrainian songs were prepared, harmonised, analysed, and transformed into a searchable map interface. Users can navigate from ethnographic regions to individual singers and complete song texts, explore emotional and thematic patterns, and investigate the geographical distribution of oral traditions.