And based these analyses, they proposed a classification based on what they see in MDS, cluster analysis and network maps.

After that, I introduced what other uses of dialectometric techniques there could be, beyond dialect classification.

Students calculated Relative Distance Value and Levenshtein distances by hand (and I went over the answers by hand too)!

I see! This seems to be a problem with several linguistic atlases unfortunately.

For my students, I have found a very nice example for how to use symbology for linguistic variation. Check out this example from the Czech linguistic atlas!

I have one map from her atlas (as an example for point-symbol map). The focus for the upcoming workshop us to show how data can be visualised through various types of maps~

The material include atlases from the German, Dutch, Romance, American, Swiss traditions, with languages ranging from Slavic to Arabic to Irish to Cantonese!

We then looked at what 'dialectology' is concerned with and the history of the field. Next week, students will bring in some pics of the linguistic atlases they have discovered in the library (treasure hunting) and we will go from there!

In the second half of the series, we will explore how computational methods can help us process more data as well as obtain an understanding of the underlying structure of our dialect data. We will start from popular dialectometric methods to more contemporary ones. 2/2

The series will start from methods in traditional dialectology/ dialect geography. Then we will explore how we can digitise dialect data from physical atlases for further analyses, including synchronic comparison and historical reconstruction. 1/2