Linguistic Atlas Project
The Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) is an example of a somewhat older digital humanities initiative – at that time, still called humanities computing – that demonstrates the evolution and development of a large scale project, and some of the challenges that such undertakings faced, and to some degree, still face. Developed with a large contribution from scholars at the University of Georgia led by Professor of Humanities and Editor Emeritus of the Linguistic Atlas Project William A. Kretzschmar, and with the website hosted at that institution, the project is notable for its goals of providing interactive visualizations incorporating geographic information systems (GIS) and for the accessibility of the data used in the project to scholars and to the general public. The suite of tools was developed under the LAMSAS name (Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). The Linguistic Atlas Project is comprised of multiple investigations into the usage and pronunciation of American English words. The project integrates data from interviews from American English speakers, dating from 1929 and still ongoing, primarily in the Western United States. Over 800 topics were discussed in most of the interviews to extract common word usages. Many of the older interviews predate tape recorders, and were therefore conducted by trained field workers, who kept detailed records in a phonetic scripting format to describe variations in pronunciation. This complex dataset was the subject of the LAP project.
The project was conceived to contribute to linguistic and cultural aspects of humanities scholarship. The interviews, viewed in aggregate, provide a detailed panorama of day-to-day life in the 20th century United States, as spoken (literally) by actual people. The interviews discuss historical topics, and consequently additional cultural and historical insights can be attained by comparing the interviews temporally and/or by different regions. The project, which began in 1990, had the task of extracting words and phrases from the interviews for subsequent computational analysis. The interface, which was quite advanced at the time, consisted of three panels, or columns, arranged horizontally. The first (leftmost) column contained user control functions, such as selecting a database or choosing an item on which to search. The middle panel contained the results of the statistical analysis, including the frequency of the occurrence of a word selected by the user, with additional information about the word usage determined from an analysis of the interviews. The last panel contained the visualization enabled by GIS, consisting of a base map layer with state boundaries, and a layer containing geographic locations plotted atop the first layer that indicate the prevalence of the selected word (Kretzschmar Jr, 2009). The system originally ran on the Apple Macintosh platform, with the GIS using the Foxbase relational database manage