Multidimensional scaling programs

[William Croft]

(apologies for cross-posting)

Dear all,

    Jason Timm, a student of mine, has adapted Keith Poole's Optimal Classification (OC) multidimensional scaling (MDS) programs (in R) for general use by linguists. The programs can be found at http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/MDS.html (case sensitive URL), along with a user guide describing MDS and what linguistic data it is suitable for, how to use the programs, and how to interpret the results.

   MDS is being used in typology for cross-linguistic comparison of language-specific category data (lexical and grammatical). But it can also be used to visualize any patterns of complex variation in the categorization of stimuli by linguistic properties. The OC algorithm allows one to model distributional data directly rather than constructing pairwise (dis)similarity matrices; for this reason, it also models lopsided data better than dissimilarity algorithms.

Bill Croft