Text Clustering of Icelandic Post-Medieval Þulur

Abstract

This article explores the possibilities of applying Runoregi – a user interface for browsing automatically computed textual similarity, originally designed for studying the Finnic oral tradition – in the research of Icelandic post-medieval þulur. Along with challenges common to oral poetry collections, the latter corpus presents some peculiar issues related to the specificity of the genre, as well as to the difference between Icelandic and the Finnic languages. Preliminary results show that the automatic poem clustering featured in Runoregi corresponds well to an existing scholarly analysis, while features such as dendrograms, side-by-side alignments or similar passage search are useful in exploratory research.