Die Digitalisierung der Bestände des Tiroler Dialektarchivs

Ein Werkstattbericht zum vorläufigen Projektende

Abstract

This paper presents the the output of the research project “Tiroler Ortsdialekte online” (TiDiOn) that aimed to digitize at least part of the archive collections of the Tyrolean Dialect Archive (University of Innsbruck) for making it accessible to the public via an interactive online linguistic atlas.

In doing so we encountered several challenges that had to be dealt with: a) structuring the data with regard to creating a database exactly adapted for our needs as well as with regard to presenting it in a way that made the generated cartographic material intelligible to the layperson, b) abstracting the material for the the sake of public intelligibility by simplifying the original records written in the phonetic alphabet “Teuthonista” and by commenting the maps in an easily understandable way, c) transferring the Teuthonista-records into a unicode-based font that can deal with the complexity of characters and combinations (some of which occurring only in a few cases). The paper presents our approaches and strategies to cope with these challenges.

Although the preparation of the material was oriented on non-expert public users the data and its presentation is of course also relevant for linguists. We exemplified that by demonstrating its relevance for questions dealing with language change or for the visualization of language geographic patterns