IT Relaunch of the web presence of the linguistic atlas ALD

IT relaunch of the web presence of the linguistic atlas ALD (full Italian title: "Atlante linguistico del ladino dolomitico e dei dialetti limitrofi") 1. History My application for research funding relates to the IT revitalization of two net -based tools related since their completion in 2012 to the linguistic atlas ALD: the search engine IRS and the sound database SDB. The ALD is a geolinguistically relevant map series documenting the local dialects (or: basilects) spoken in an area of about 25 000 km2 in north-eastern Italy and south-eastern Switzerland, using 217 inquiry points. The following idioms are spoken in this area: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian, Lombard, Trentinian and Venetian. 2. Methodological orientation of ALD The two parts of ALD (ALD-I: publ. 1998, ALD-II: publ. 2012) stand methodologically in the tradition of the classical Romance linguistic geography, which was founded by Jules Gilliéron (1854-1926) with the ALF ("Atlas linguistique de la France", 1902-1910) and continued by Karl Jaberg (1877-1958) and Jakob Jud (1882-1952) via the AIS ("Atlante italo-Svizzero"; recte: "Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz", 1928-1940). The ALD thus serves to document only the dia- or basilectal competences of the local speakers who generally are bi- or trilingual. Only what was explicitly considered "dialectal" by the speakers was collected. 3. The research process on ALD-I and ALD-II In the years 1985-1992 and 2001-2007, trained dialectologists have asked about 2,000 questions to about 1,300 informants in the above-mentioned zone. The answers given by them were immediately transcribed and recorded on tape. The data were then digitally recorded in Salzburg and finally prepared for printing and for the creation of innovative IT tools both "for the eye" ( two search engines IRS) and "for the ear" ( one Speaking Atlas [only for the ALD-I] and two sound databases SDB). The whole research project was carried out in two phases: ALD-I: 1985-1998; ALD-II: 1999-2012, corresponding to two different publication dates (1998 and 2012), on paper, on electronic media and on the web. The main sponsor of ALD was always the FWF. 4.The innovative value of the ALD net-tools Both IRS and SDB were (and still are) absolute innovations in the context of atlas -based linguistic geography. Unfortunately, from about 2016 onwards, both encountered more and more technical difficulties due to the rapid IT change, so that their adaptation to current IT standards has become inevitable. IRS was originally programmed in Flash, and SDB in Java (version 7.91). Both Flash and Java are not future-proof. They must therefore be replaced by HTML technology. 5. IT technical update At the University of Munich (Department "IT Geisteswissenschaften") I could find two students of Computational Linguistics and Computer Science (David and Tobias Englmeier) who had already developed excellent IT solutions for linguistic problems on several occasions. They presented a work plan for the HTML-based renewal of the network tools IRS and SDB, which is scheduled for 12 months. The amount of funding applied for is intended to reward the IT work envisaged.