lessons from digitizing a linguistic atlas sheila embleton, dorin uritescu and eric s. wheeler york...

Lessons from Digitizing a Linguistic Atlas

Sheila Embleton, Dorin Uritescu and

Eric S. Wheeler

York University Toronto, Canada

Outline Introduction to RODA

Practical Lessons

General Lessons

Introduction to RODA

Romanian

Romanian and Romance

Noul Atlas lingvistic român. Crisana Crisana region in

north-west Romania

Hard copy atlas by Stan and Uritescu (1996, 2003, etc)

Digitize to make it more accessible

Objective Use Information Technology to

permit a broad range of scholars to access the data, select the data appropriately, and present the data clearly;

and so gain greater understanding of its significance.

Digitizing the data

RODA custom font

Search, count, display, compare

Multidimensional Scaling

Lessons Learned

Previous projects Finnish (Kettunen 1940)

Digitized a large, out-of-print atlas English (Computerized Linguistic

Atlas of English -- CLAE) Used someone else’s digital data

Practical Custom data entry Flat files Modular application Flexible development process Good editing team for quality control

RODA virtual keyboard

Data file

RODA: Romanian Online Dialect Atlas (Crişana)

http://www.yorku.ca/vpaweb/romanian/

Contacts Sheila Embletonembleton@yorku.ca Dorin Uritescudorinu@yorku.ca Eric Wheelerwheeler@ericwheeler.ca

Test sites: ericwheeler.ca/test

General More than maps:

Access to data More than “isoglosses”

Multiple ways of seeing geographic variation

More than Dialectology Across disciplines

Interpretive map

Data as editable list

Selection

General More than maps:

Access to data More than “isoglosses”

Multiple ways of seeing geographic variation

More than Dialectology Across disciplines

Hierarchy of dialect patterns

General More than maps:

Access to data More than “isoglosses”

Multiple ways of seeing geographic variation

More than Dialectology Across disciplines

Online Dialect Atlas Access to data

The power of Information Technology to:• Store• Search• Present

Rapid, repeatable, consistent processing of the data

RODA: Romanian Online Dialect Atlas (Crişana)

http://www.yorku.ca/vpaweb/romanian/