Tag Archives: dataset

Five Recommendations for Creating Spreadsheets

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Through the rapid increase in digital data, the use of tabular formats for data has also increased notably. However, the reusability of data is still an issue due to the lack of transparency in the presentation of data in spreadsheets. In our work with the Concepticon, we sometimes encounter spreadsheets provided by researchers that contain information not transparent to an external audience. Therefore, I offer guidelines on how to format tables with data and provide five concrete recommendations.

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Converting the Vietic Dataset by Sidwell and Alves from 2021 to CLDF

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A few days ago, Sidwell and Alves submitted a very nice dataset on Vietic languages to Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.5263194). When inspecting the data, I realized that this dataset could be easily converted to our CLDF formats in our new Lexibank standards. Since both authors explicitly invited for discussions of the data and the testing of the results, I thought it would even be better to quickly illustrate the CLDF conversion in a blog post, as this may enable colleagues to do the same with their datasets in the future.

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Computer-Assisted Comparison of Gelong and Hlai using Cross-Linguistic Data Formats

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In this study, we discuss the sparsely studied Gelong language of Hainan Island and its affiliation to the Hlai languages. Our work is based on Andy Chin’s article “The Gelong Language in the Multilingual Hub of Hainan”. We extracted Chin’s data and processed it with the help of various computer-assisted methods in order to make it more accessible, machine-readable, and comparable with other datasets.

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A multilingual body part concept list

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In the summer of 2018, I set out to collect data for my master’s thesis (Tjuka 2019). The goal was to elicit body part terms that can also refer to object and landscape features. This was BC (before COVID-19), so I was able to meet with informants living in Berlin at the time and conduct my urban fieldwork study. The informants who participated in the study spoke one of 13 different languages (e.g., Wolof, Vietnamese, Czech). As a first task, I elicited 28 body part terms to get a sense of the naming patterns in each language. This blog post provides background information and introduces the resulting multilingual body part concept list.

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Annotating Rhyme Judgments for a Complex Corpus of Manuscript Sources: Making Sense of the «Cang Jie pian 蒼頡篇»

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Establishing a standardized annotation framework for communicating rhyme judgments identified in historical texts will both ease the use of computational tools for rhyme analysis, and hopefully inspire greater collaboration amongst scholars interested in historical linguistics. The framework we have proposed (List, Hill & Foster 2019), was designed with simplicity, exhaustiveness, and flexibility in mind (p. 30), with the intension of eventual inclusion in the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative (https://cldf.clld.org). Further testing of the framework is desired to demonstrate its utility and identify areas requiring refinement. This study presents such a test on rhyming in the Cang Jie pian 蒼頡篇, an ancient Chinese scribal treatise only recently reconstructed from a complex corpus of surviving manuscript fragments. In a follow-up study, the proposal will be formally evaluated by providing code to test the annotations.

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A list of 171 body part concepts

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The body of most human beings consist of similar parts such as a head, arms, legs, and so on. Many body parts also occur in animals. The shapes and functions of body parts are universal across cultures, but speakers of various languages choose to categorize the body differently. For example, Vietnamese has a single word (tay) for the concepts HAND and ARM. The universality of the human body and its categorization into different parts have attracted attention across research areas such as lexical typology and cognitive science. Therefore, I present a comprehensive list of human and animal body part terms based on German which were mapped to the concepts in the Concepticon (List et al. 2020). The list is intended for investigations on cross-linugistic naming patterns of body parts.

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