Tag Archives: tutorial

How to Visualize Colexification Networks in Cytoscape (How to Do X in Linguistics 14)

The ability to visualize data in an intelligible way is an important skill for scientists. In linguistics, especially in lexical semantics, data are often visualized using graphs, i.e., networks. For example, in the web app for the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), we use networks to illustrate that a lexical form refers to two different concepts by connecting the concepts (i.e., nodes) with a line (i.e., edge). When identifying the colexifications between concepts across a large number of languages, the network grows and a tool to visualize multiple data points becomes necessary. Here, I present a tutorial for the first steps to visualize a colexification network with Cytoscape. The tutorial is intended for beginners who want to learn how the tool works and serves as a starting point for further skill development.

Continue reading

Creating Custom Commands in CLDF: From Lexibank to Nexus Files

Thanks to the CLDFBench Python package, CLDF datasets compiled with CLDFbench have a rich command-line utility that can easily be expanded by custom commands (Forkel et al. 2018, Forkel and List 2020) . Taking as an example the creation of a Nexus-file for phylogenetic analysis from an existing Lexibank Wordlist (List et al. 2022) , this tutorial will guide you through the necessary steps for writing a script that can be used as a CLDFBench command. You will then be able to apply the same workflow to other scripts you may want to use for a certain repository.

Continue reading

Converting Streitberg’s Gothic Dictionary to a CLDF Wordlist on a Windows System

I recently converted the Gothic dictionary written by Wilhelm Streitberg to a CLDF wordlist. Since I was using Windows, I had some difficulties during the conversion progress, which Unix system users may not have to deal with. I thought it would be useful to share my experience here and point out that users of Windows operating systems should be aware of certain aspects when converting data to CLDF.

Continue reading

Adding concept lists to Concepticon: A guide for beginners

Scientific data should be openly accessible. This includes databases which are designed for collaborative work. However, in most cases, these databases are only extended by a team of experts. If a database is truly collaborative, the workflows need to be accessible for everybody. The Concepticon database  (List et al., 2019) invites contributors to include their own data sets. This requires a transparent description of the contributing process.

Continue reading

A Primer on Automatic Inference of Sound Correspondence Patterns (1): Introduction

After about three years of work on the matter, I have managed (with help of many colleagues who helped in testing) to develop a first approach for the automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns, which will soon be published with Computational Linguistics (List 2019). The key task which this algorithm solves is to take aligned data as input and to compute explicit sound correspondence patterns from the alignments.

Continue reading