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Enhancing Language Resources with Maps

We will look at how maps can be integrated in research resources, such as language databases and language corpora. By using maps, search results can be illustrated in a way that immediately gives the user information that words or numbers on their own would not give. We will illustrate with two different resources, into which we have now added a Google Maps application: The Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen et al. 2009) and The Nordic Syntactic Judgments Database (Lindstad et al. 2009). We have integrated Google Maps into these applications. The database contains some hundred syntactic test sentences that have been evaluated by four speakers in more than hundred locations in Norway and Sweden. Searching for the evaluations of a particular sentence gives a list of several hundred judgments, which are difficult for a human researcher to assess. With the map option, isoglosses are immediately visible. We show in the paper that both with the maps depicting corpus hits and with the maps depicting database results, the map visualizations actually show clear geographical differences that would be very difficult to spot just by reading concordance lines or database tables.