Scientists unlock 15-year-old digital archive of Pacific language data
Researchers have transformed a previously unusable digital collection into a usable dataset mapping where a quarter of the world's languages are spoken across the Pacific. The work enables new analysis of how languages interact in the world's most linguistically diverse region, and offers a template for other institutions digitizing major research collections.
Originaltitel: A revised digital edition of Wurm & Hattori's Language Atlas of the Pacific Area
<p>Wurm & Hattori's Language Atlas of the Pacific Area describes the geographic speaker areas of the languages and language varieties spoken in the Pacific. Thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, this monumental piece of work has been available in digital form for over 15 years. But lacking proper identification of language varieties, this digitized data was largely unusable for today's research methods. We turned ECAI's digitized artefacts of the Language Atlas into an open, reusable geo-referenced dataset of speaker area polygons for a quarter of the world's languages. This allows for much more refined analysis methods to, for example, analyse language contact in the area of the world with the highest linguistic diversity. We also describe a number of tool applications and quality checks which may be useful for methodological development in similar digitization efforts.</p>