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Research
Project Overview
The marking and transcription project is part of the long-term research project VerbaAlpina of Munich University (https://www.verba-alpina.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/) which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since October 2014. VerbaAlpina seeks to investigate the linguistic and cultural area of the entire European Alpine region from a transnational perspective. The project's study area is limited to the territorial borders defined by the Alpine convention (www.alpconv.org/). The European Alpine region is characterised by its ethnographic and topographic homogeneity and at the same time by its strong linguistic heterogeneity what makes it become of particular interest for linguists. In fact, this area covers three big language families: Germanic, Romance and Slavonic. Accordingly, VerbaAlpina deals with the following languages and their respective dialects: German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Franco-Provençal, Romansh, Ladin, Friulian and Occitan.
Figure 1: The area under investigation in VerbaAlpina corresponding to the Alpine region as defined by the Alpine Convention (map created by VerbaAlpina)
Project Stages
VerbaAlpina is concerned with the lexis of three conceptual domains in three stages. Stage one (from October 2014 to October 2017) focused on vocabulary related to alpine pasture farming, in particular, milk processing. In the second phase (from November 2017 to November 2020) the project was concerned with the lexis of the domains fauna, flora, landscape formations and weather. In the current phase (from November 2020 to October 2023) the project deals with the vocabulary of modern alpine life (ecology, tourism).
Figure 2: The different project stages of VerbaAlpina
Main Goal
The guiding intention of VerbaAlpina is to analyze analogue data from traditional linguistic atlases and dictionaries as well as recent data gathered via the project's crowdsourcing tool (on https://www.verba-alpina.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/crowdsourcing). To this end, this data first has to undergo a process of systematic data processing to fit the unified structure of the project's relational database (MySQL). This process can be subdivided into three major steps: transcription, tokenisation and typification.
Figure 3: Crowdsourcing tool of VerbaAlpina
Why we need you
The data from linguistic atlases cannot yet be transcribed automatically since the assignment of number and text on the atlas maps cannot be automated so far. With our marking and transcription project on Zooniverse we would therefore like to work on both the assignment of a word to the corresponding number (in our marking task) and the transcription of the words on the maps (in our optional transcription task) by making use of the power of the crowd.
Data Source
On this page you will be presented with images of maps from the Italian atlas AIS (Atlante linguistico ed etnografico dell'Italia e della Svizzera meridionale, “Linguistic and ethnographic atlas of Italy and southern Switzerland”). This atlas is a collection of maps of Italy and southern Switzerland that present words, concepts or phrases in their respective dialectal forms, highlighting the linguistic differences between the various locations. The atlas comprises eight volumes of 200 maps each which have been published between 1928 and 1940. Instead of following the traditional alphabetical order of other linguistic atlases, the volumes are ordered by semantic fields. On this page you will only be shown maps which deal with vocabulary from the realm of "natural environment" (fauna, flora, landscape formations, weather) that is relevant for our second project phase.