The PHOIBLE Explorer
Combining areal and genealogical information of the PHOIBLE database

  1. Thomas Mayer
    Code on Github

The tool is best viewed in the two-column layout with a browser window size of minimum 1,000px.

Features

advancedTongueRoot
anterior
approximant
back
click
consonantal
constrictedGlottis
continuant
coronal
delayedRelease
distributed
dorsal
epilaryngealSource
fortis
front
high
labial
labiodental
lateral
long
low
loweredLarynxImplosive
nasal
periodicGlottalStop
raisedLarynxEjective
retractedTongueRoot
round
short
sonorant
spreadGlottis
stress
strident
syllabic
tap
tense
tone
trill
 

Map



 

Sunburst


 

Description

The PHOIBLE Explorer shows the values for all PHOIBLE phonemes by combining the geolocation of the respective languages with their genealogy in a sunburst visualization (Stasko and Zhang 2000). The map and the sunburst is enhanced with interactive functionalities. You can select a region in the world map to get only those languages spoken in that area displayed in the sunburst. The sunburst itself is zoomable. If you click on a segment, only the languages of the respective subfamily are displayed.

All data for the PHOIBLE Explorer (including the genealogical information) has been taken from PHOIBLE (Moran et al. 2014). The macro areas are adapted from Dryer (1992).

If you use the PHOIBLE Explorer in your research, please cite the third paper in the References section (Mayer et al. 2014). The PHOIBLE Explorer is based on the WALS Sunburst Explorer (http://th-mayer.de/wals/) and the World's Languages Explorer by Christian Rohrdantz, Michael Hund, Thomas Mayer, Bernhard Wälchli and Daniel A. Keim (Rohrdantz et al. 2012).

The PHOIBLE Explorer is implemented in JavaScript using the D3 library (Bostock et al. 2011).

The visualization has been funded by the DFG project “Algorithmic corpus-based approaches to typological comparison” at the Philipps-Universität Marburg.

References

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

  • Dryer, Matthew S. 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language, 68(1), 81-138.

  • 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.

  • Moran, Steven, Daniel McCloy and Richard Wright (eds.) 2014. PHOIBLE Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://phoible.org, Accessed on 2014-09-30.)

  • Rohrdantz, Christian, Michael Hund, Thomas Mayer, Bernhard Wälchli and Daniel A. Keim. 2012. The World’s Languages Explorer: Visual analysis of language features in genealogical and areal contexts. In Computer Graphic Forum, 31(3), 935–944. [ link]

  • 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.