A spatio-temporal visual analysis tool for historical dictionaries

The exploreAT! project aims to give insights into the richness of the German language in the Austrian area through a rich and unique collection of dialect words of the Bavarian dialects recorded during the former Austrian-Hungariann Monarchy period and beyond. Originally collected by means of questionnaires, words were noted in handwriting on individual paper slips, covering topics from nature and food to religious festivities, etc. Once digitized, the full database contains around 3.5 million single data entries with an estimated 200,000 headwords, which requires substantial effort if the analysts want to access specific information from the data set. It should also be noted that the data presents a high heterogeneity in terms of its nature and origin (from questionnaires, collectors, scientists, spoken language, hand written notes, etc.), which calls for the creation of a homogeneous database containing all of the available information.

In this paper we present a tool aimed to improve the comprehension of that massive amount of data through visualization means, thus trying to help in the reach of meaningful conclusions and the acquisition of valuable insights in easy and fast ways. With it, analysts can discover cultural issues and access them through means of language and visualization. This is possible thanks to a multidimensional approach to data analysis based on the use of maps, projections and other visualization artifacts. To reach our goal, a team of experts with different backgrounds worked together trying to close the gap between the Humanities and Computer Sciences fields through the creation of our prototype and its multiple iterations.