Lev Michael receives grant for linguistic mapping project (BeLMaP)
Published January 31, 2009
Lev Michael was recently awarded a $20,000 grant from the Berkeley Humanities and Arts Research Technologies initiative (funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation) for a collaborative pilot project to develop tools to facilitate linguists' efforts to detect spatial patterns in linguistic data. Using freely available open source applications, programming languages, and scripting languages, the Berkeley Linguistic Mapping Project (BeLMaP), aims to develop resources for creating spatially-indexed linguistic datasets and for importing them into Quantum GIS, an open source Geographic Information System platform, for spatial analysis. This phase of the project will use linguistic data from the Caucasus region and Amazonia as testbeds, exploring contact phenomena in these two areas to evaluate the tools being developed. The BeLMaP collaboration currently involves Johanna Nichols (Professor, Slavic Languages and Literature), Ronald Sprouse (Programmer and Analyst, Linguistics), Hannah Haynie (Graduate Student, Linguistics), and Lev Michael.