Tutorial 5: Gabmap: A Web Application for Analyzing Linguistic Variation

Half-day tutorial
Time: Sunday, June 19, 8:30 a.m. – noon
Room: Meyer Library 280E (Language Lab)

John Nerbonne, Charlotte Gooskens, Therese Leinonen, Martjin Wieling, Peter Kleiweg

Topics: linguistics
Keywords: linguistics, dialects, dialectology, web application, cartography

gabmap – a web application for analyzing linguistic variation

At the University of Groningen the gabmap web application has been developed to measure differences in linguistic samples, including in particular sets of phonetic (or phonemic) transcriptions, and to project the results graphically onto maps. Gabmap is a graphical user interface that implements not only the comparison of vocabulary or other categorical data (essentially as percentage overlap or percentage difference) but also that of pronunciations via edit distance. Because the software is implemented as a web application users are not required to download it nor to keep it up to date by following releases. It is fairly user friendly and easily accessible and therefore enables experimentation with different techniques popular among linguists from various fields, especially dialectology and variationist linguistics.

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