25.3625, FYI: The WALS Sunburst Explorer

Tue Sep 16 20:07:46 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-3625. Tue Sep 16 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.3625, FYI: The WALS Sunburst Explorer

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Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 16:06:57
From: Thomas Mayer [thomas.mayer at uni-marburg.de]
Subject: The WALS Sunburst Explorer

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We're proud to announce the release of the WALS Sunburst Explorer
(http://th-mayer.de/wals/), an online visualization tool that combines areal
and genealogical information of the WALS database (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013;
http://wals.info).

The WALS Sunburst Explorer shows the values for all WALS features by combining
the geolocation of the respective languages with their genealogy in a sunburst
visualization (Stasko and Zhang 2000). The map and the sunburst are enhanced
with interactive functionality and linked views. The user can select a region
of the world map to get only those languages spoken in that area displayed in
the sunburst. The sunburst itself is zoomable. If you click on a segment, only
the languages of the respective subfamily are displayed. 

The main aim of the WALS Sunburst Explorer is to help its users to distinguish
between cases of language contact and genealogical inheritance (Mayer et al.
2014; Rohrdantz et al. 2012). The combination of both types of information can
be approached from two different angles. The first approach focuses on a given
geographical distribution to explore whether the languages in that area all
belong to the same family and thus lead to a clustering of the inherited
feature at a certain region of the world or whether there is a real contact
situation with unrelated or distantly related languages sharing the feature
through borrowing. The second approach concentrates on a given language family
to check whether the feature values are the same or similar for all members of
the family or whether a divergent feature value can be attributed to the fact
that the language is spoken in a different region and might have borrowed the
divergent feature from a neighboring language. The WALS Explorer provides the
necessary functionalities to tackle both approaches. 

Thomas Mayer, Bernhard Wälchli, Christian Rohrdantz, Michael Hund

References:
Dryer, Matthew S. and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2013. The World Atlas of
Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/, Accessed on 2014-08-13.)

Mayer, Thomas, Bernhard Wälchli, Christian Rohrdantz and Michael Hund. 2014.
>From the extraction of continuous features in parallel texts to visual
analytics of heterogeneous areal-typological datasets. In Nolan, Brian and
Carlos Pascual-Periñán (eds.), Language processing and grammars: The role of
functionally oriented computational models (SLCS) (Serie: Studies in
Language). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13-38.

Rohrdantz, Christian, Hund, Michael, Mayer, Thomas, Wälchli, Bernhard & Keim,
Daniel A. 2012. The World’s Languages Explorer: Visual analysis of language
features in genealogical and areal contexts. Computer Graphics Forum 31(3):
935–944.

Stasko, John & Zhang, Eugene. 2000. Focus+context display and navigation
techniques for enhancing radial, space-filling hierarchy visualizations. In
Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization. Los Alamitos
CA: IEEE Computer Society, 57–65.

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
                     Typology

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