List & Mayer - Visualizing Genetic Language Relations in Geographic Space

 

Visualizing Genetic Language Relations in Geographic Space

AVML - Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics
24-26 September 2014, Tübingen

Johann-Mattis List / mattis.list@uni-marburg.de
Thomas Mayer / thomas.mayer@uni-marburg.de

Overview

  1. How to represent language history?
  2. What can visual analytics contribute?
  3. TREX - Tree Explorer
  4. Conclusions

What can visual analytics contribute?

  • Interaction

  • Transition

Towards an interactive representation of language history

  • Combining an areal representation with

  • a genealogical representaion

Sunburst visualization

  • A sunburst visualization (Stasko and Zhang 2000) is a radial space-filling visualization technique for displaying hierarchical structures.
  • A sunburst is similar to a treemap, except it uses a radial layout.
Stasko, John and Eugene Zhang. 2000. Focus+context display and navigation techniques for enhancing radial, space-filling hierarchy visualizations. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 57–65. Los Alamitos CA: IEEE Computer Society.

Sunburst example

The WALS Sunburst Explorer http://th-mayer.de/wals/

Mayer, Thomas, Bernhard Wälchli, Christian Rohrdantz and Michael Hund. 2014. From the extraction of continuous features in parallel texts to visual analytics of heterogeneous areal-typological datasets. In Nolan, Brian and Carlos Pascual-Periñán (eds.), Language processing and grammars: The role of functionally oriented computational models (SLCS) (Serie: Studies in Language). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13-38.

Voronoi tesselation

URL: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060366

Implementation

  • The tool is implemented in JavaScript using the D3.js library (Bostock et al. 2011)
  • The map is generated with TopoJSON
  • The voronoi tesselation is created with the D3.geom.voronoi() method

Bostock, Michael, Vadim Ogievetsky and Jeffrey Heer. 2011. D3: Data-driven documents. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 17(12), 2301–2309.

TREX - Tree Explorer
http://dighl.github.io/TREX/

Conclusions

  • Interactive visualizations can help to detect interesting aspects in the data
  • Transitions in the visualization help the user to track the changes in the visual display
  • A proper representation of language change involves interactive visualizations

Thank you for your attention!

Johann-Mattis List mattis.list@uni-marburg.de
Thomas Mayer thomas.mayer@uni-marburg.de