The Fun of Exploration: How to Access a Non-Standard Language Corpus Visually

Abstract

Historical dictionaries and non-standard language corpora can greatly benefit from a visual access in order to grasp the inherent tangled and complex nature of the knowledge encapsulated in them. Although visual analytics has been used to tackle a number of language and document related problems, most dictionaries are still reproducing the book metaphor in which Web pages substitute the paper and the user experience is only enhanced by means of hyperlinks. Although fields such as dialectology and dialectal lexicography have incorporated Geographic Information Systems and advanced computational linguistics features, spatio-temporal dynamics can be discovered or understood if appropriate visual analytics techniques are used to surpass the idea of these linguistic resources as alphabetically ordered lists. In this paper we present the work carried out in this direction for the Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects in Austria. By means of multiple-linked views an access that fosters the exploratory analysis of the data is enabled.