In the last millennium one of the most important changes in the natural environment of the Great Hungarian Plain was the process of river regulation. Although the Plain was formed by the alluvial deposits of two main rivers, the Danube and the Tisza, the former runs at the edge of the lowland, while the latter flows right through the middle of it. Consequently, the regulation of the Tisza and its tributaries had a much more widespread environmental impact. The process deserves a closer look from the point of view of historical ecology/environmental history. Regulation works initiated a dramatic change in the adaptation strategies of people living along the rivers.

First the author summarizes the attempts of defining the regions of Hungarian folk culture and he concludes that the next step in this kind of investigation must be a certain definition based on as many cultural elements as possible. He intends to do it by using the database of the A tlas of Hungarian Folk Culture and computer methods. He investigates the opportunity and the problems of the transformation of the data of the Atlas into a computer database, he presents the problems to be solved and some possible solutions. He concludes that for various reasons only a limited number of the cultural phenomena mapped in the atlas are suitable for computer analysis. He summarizes the methodological background of the correlation and cluster analysis to be used. He emphasizes that due to the special character of mapping the inconsistencies and the mixing of different points of view in the Atlas, and to the character of the computer analysis that is mechanical and not elaborate enough, this kind of definition of the cultural regions of the Hungarian-speaking areas cannot replace the previous definition of regions but it can offer a good frame of reference to define the regions more precisely.

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