An Exploration into the Management of High Volumes of Complex Knowledge in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

Dialectology provides a good test-bed for dealing with the problems (found widely in the social sciences and humanities) of high volumes of complex data. In the Romanian Online Dialect Atlas project, we undertake to capture an extensive dataset online, present the data in ways that are useful to a wide range of researchers, and apply an innovative technique to the data (using the statistical technique called multidimensional scaling). The Romanian data is important both for Romanian and Romance linguistics, and for what it demonstrates about dialectology in general.