Humans Who Read Grammars

We've made a new friend on the Internets (yes, the internet can be a great place to make new friends, it's not just arguing with Drunk Uncles and cats). The new friend is Stephan Steinbach from the blog Alternative Transport . His blog does very interesting work on data visualisations, in particular maps, go check it out. He recently made a post  in relation to our old post about illustrating questions about linguistic diversity.  For other posts from us with data visualisation/illustration, go here . While we're on the topic of visualising geographic data (i.e. data somehow tied to a place, such as number of languages etc), go check out Speckman's lab in Eindhoven . They've made a neat kind of map visualization called " necklace maps ". If you're really into map visualisation you can even play their game on making cartograms !

This image illustrates the situation that any researchers trying to understand and reconstruct the past of a current situation with related  tokens  faces - be it in biology, linguistics or another field. Only a sliver, a slice of time is available to us and from that we try to go back and reconstruct relationships. What's nice about this picture is the branches reaching across (C), thus appearing close to others (B) in that slice of time, but actually it's genealogically related to another further away token (F). It does not really illustrate horizontal influence, i.e languages (in our case) becoming similar due to contact - unless you consider the closeness across the x & z-axis' , like with C & B. Also, notice the branches that don't make it all the way up, the extinct species/languages/etc. I saw this image for the first time in a presentation by Fiona Jordan and liked it a lot. It's originally from Strickberger (1990), who adapted the...

I made some maps of language diversity, to add to Hedvig's long lists of existing info graphics here and here , using data from Glottolog.  I wanted to make a map showing the number of language families - 272 according to Glottolog, not counting sign languages, artificial languages, creoles, pidgins, and mixed languages.  Each curve shows the area in which languages in these families are found.  The colors were randomly selected in order to try making the curves distinct from each other, although in some areas these are difficult to make out, such as in southeast Asia.   Try spotting in particular Indo-European, Turkic, Afro-Asiatic, Na-Dene, Quechua and Niger-Congo. Austronesian is the red triangle in the right hand corner, although my curve-plotting algorithm makes it incorrectly cover Australia as well.   The maps are generated in R using the 'maps' package.  Here's a function 'drawcurve' in R for drawing curves of a particular colour around a se...

Hiya readers,  This is a post more about public outreach by scientists and journalism than linguistic diversity or description; please bear with me. _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ TL;DR: Journalists are producing more and more composite stories where infographics and fact sheets are being used as separate entities. The interest for the infographic of the world's languages that I made a post about is an example of this. The public's awareness of the world is being shaped more by media outlets and journalists and less by published academic papers, education and/or encyclopaedias. Many of these stories and facts require more context and background to make sense. There is a higher demand than before on consumers of information evaluating and judging the information.  Researchers are also becoming more interested in publicly accessible visualisations of their work. Journalists and researchers are very sim...

Have you seen this infographic ( click here for original post and larger size )? It's been floating around various linguistics blogs, been shared of 32 thousands times on the book of faces and been reblogged and retweeted in many other places.  I bet you found a flaw in it! Did you read the fine print and look up the sources (it's mostly from just this page )? No? It's ok. Allow me to give some explanation and context, as a diversity linguists working with public outreach - I'd like to take this chance to explain some things about data on languages of the world. © 2015 Alberto Lucas López, South China Morning Post  Publishers Ltd The international edition of the newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP)  published this infographic of languages of the world  on the 27th of May and later updated it. SCMP is an English language newspaper based in Hong Kong. They have a great internet presence and have made several neat infographics  on other topics....