GIS, Maps and Mapping in Linguistic Research
Stockholm University
In this talk I introduce basic concepts of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and their applicability to linguistic research. I also offer a critical overview of the ways language mapping has been traditionally done following (Dahl and Veselinova 2005).
I argue that despite the fact that the linguistic community has been mastering the GIS technology in the past 15 years, we continue to be very traditional in our approach to showing the location of the languages in the world. For instance, the language composition of urban areas is still largely understudied. We also remain unaware of geographic definitions and standards with regard to GIS workflow and cartography. As a partial illustration of this, I discuss two existing projects, Langscape, University of Maryland, and the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Both of them can be seen as innovative in the sense that they offer dynamic language maps. At the same time, all of these projects show, in varying degrees, a more or less traditional approach to language mapping.
At present, geo-linguistic data typically come in two forms, (i) maps where language location is represented by means of abstract areas and (ii) listings of populated places and areas in language descriptions. As pointed out by (Briscoe, 2009), such sources do not stand the scrutiny of data collection process from a GIS perspective. Specifically, typical attributes of GIS data such as spatial accuracy, data completeness as well as documentation of the collection process are at best scarce, if present at all. However, since the use of GIS tools in linguistic research is still in its infancy and a lot of valuable information is found in the traditional sources just mentioned, they cannot be lightly discarded.
Finally, I argue that when adopting the GIS technology, we should depart from our traditional view of maps as picture products but rather conceive of them, first and foremost, as visualizations of data. That is, when designing maps, we should adopt the geographer’s perspective on mapping and cartography as much as possible. It is also essential to define our own standards for language mapping and include teaching of relevant subjects in our programs.
References
Briscoe, Ulla. 2009. Geolinguistic GIS Applications: Aspect of Data Quality in Mapping Lesser-Used Languages, Centre for Geoinformatics (Z_GIS), Salzburg University.
Dahl, Östen, and Veselinova, Ljuba. 2005. Language Map Server. Paper presented at 25th ESRI International User Conference, San Diego.