Linguistic Databases of the American Linguistic Atlas Project (ALAP)
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., University of Georgia

During the 1980s we began to store and manipulate linguistic data from ALAP
on computers.  The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) was the
first project to use computer storage (see Kretzschmar 1988), followed by
the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS;
Kretzschmar et al. 1993).  LAGS relied on ASCII text files; initial
work for LAMSAS made use of the Rbase DBMS program, and later converted to
comma-delimited ASCII files (Kretzschmar and Konopka 1996).  This ALAP data
consists of responses corresponding to elicitation targets, recorded as
individual words or short phrases in both standard orthography and
impressionistic Atlas phonetics, are recorded in separate data tables for
each item. All digitized LAMSAS data has been available on the Web since
the mid-1990s (http://us.english.uga.edu) activated with interactive tools
for searching, displaying, and mapping data; other ALAP files are just
available for download.

We now propose redesign the data structure for ALAP: to encode the
transcripts of later tape-recorded interviews with XML, and useXSL in
conjunction with other programming to retrieve particular targets and
automate analytical steps. We propose to

--display full text of transcriptions
--link sound to the text so that users can hear what they read as they read
--associate acoustical phonetic information with pronunciation targets
--associate graphical F1/F2 plots with pronunciation targets
--associate listing and tally scripts with lexical targets
--enable GIS plotting (maps) for pronunciation and lexical targets
--enable technical geography functions for pronunciation and lexical targets
--enable syntactic analysis through POS tagging
--enable KWIC concordance displays across different texts
--extract and display aggregated informant biographical information
--link informant information and text access to regional maps
--link help screens and other useful information to texts and analyses

In short, we will build an interactive multimedia Web site that will
allow users both to access and to analyze a large corpus of spoken
interviews. Various sources serve sound or data on theWeb, including our
own first-generation Linguistic Atlas site, but to our knowledge no
existing site does so as part of an integrated package like this one.

References

W. Kretzschmar.  1988.  Computers and the American
Linguistic Atlas.  In Methods in Dialectology: Proceedings of the
Sixth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, edited by
A. Thomas , 200-24. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

W. Kretzschmar et al.  1993.  Handbook of the Linguistic
Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States. University of Chicago
Press, 1993

Kretzschmar, W. and R. Konopka.  1996. Management of Linguistic
Databases. Journal of English Linguistics 24 (1996),
61-70.