Introduction: New Possibilities for Language Maps
Michael K. Buckland, Co-Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, and
Emeritus Professor, School of Information Management and Systems,
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600
buckland@simsberkeley.edu

Overview of Pacific Language Mapping Project
David Blundell
pacific@uclink.berkeley.edu

The Digital Language Atlas of China
Lawrence Crissman, Griffith University
l.crissman@griffith.edu.au

Web Implementation of a Language and Culture Atlas
Jeanette Zerneke, UC Berkeley
jlz@berkeley.edu

Visualization of the Batanes and Orchid Island Mapping
David Blundell
pacific@uclink.berkeley.edu

Abstracts

Introduction: New Possibilities for Language Maps
Michael K. Buckland, University of California, Berkeley

A brief introduction to language maps, isogloss maps, and their potential contribution in cultural atlases. A digital environment not only allows for digital language maps, but also their wider use in conjunction with other kinds of geographical information, for using language maps as a surrogate for cultural maps, and as context for geographic search interfaces.

Overview of Pacific Language Mapping Project
David Blundell

Over the past few years, groups from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and others have setup the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), to connect areas of the world through a commonality of digital geographic information systems (GIS). From these shared projects, scholars have unified a technical information network with parameters to chart global spatial temporal data. Research data is indexed for retrieval and displayed on a map-based interface on remote servers, maintained by individual scholars or by academic institutions, and available by users over the Internet. The ECAI Austronesia Team developed the project discussed here.
The ECAI Pacific Language Mapping project combines the generation of a digital GIS version of the Language Atlas of the Pacific Area (Wurm and Hattori 1981 and 1983) with historic maps and the collection of data on contemporary language and culture areas as dynamic (time-enabled) maps. The result is an ongoing collaborative in research for scholarly and community exchange from the archaeological record to existing cultures across the domain of Pacific languages including the Austronesian languages, Papuan languages, and the Australian aboriginal languages. Other languages represented include overseas Chinese trade languages, Pidgins, partial Austro-Asiatic languages, and colonial languages.

Key words: Pacific languages, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), language and culture mapping, temporal spatial charting, geographic information systems (GIS)

The Digital Language Atlas of China
Lawrence Crissman, Griffith University

The Language Atlas of China, edited by S. A. Wurm and Li Rong, et. al., was published by the Longman Group (Far East) in 1987 (or 1988), having been produced by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Working under copyright permissions from both the AAH (which owns the copyright to the maps) and the LG, in the mid-1990s I began to produce GIS versions of the maps in the Atlas with the cooperation of Theo Bauman, the Cartographer and Technical Editor for the volume. Progress beyond the first four A series maps covering all of China, for which preliminary versions were produced in the late 1990s, was delayed until 2000, when considerable progress was made on the more detailed B and C series maps for languages and dialects at regional and provincial levels. In late 2001, while on sabbatical at McGill University, high resolution scans of all the maps were made and I scanned the text pages of the Atlas, and used OCR to produce e-text versions. In 2002 the GIS data were incorporated into an ArcGIS geodatabase. However, differences between the paper maps in the Atlas and the way they were digitised produced incompatibilities between the spatial data for different languages, particularly in linguistically complex southern China. Those inconsistencies have now been rectified, allowing the Digital Language Atlas of China to be finalised and made available through the ECAI Clearinghouse.

This paper discusses some of the technical issues and problems that arose during the production of the Digital Language Atlas of China, and how they were resolved. I believe that these cases provide interesting lessons for anyone contemplating similar work in the production of cultural atlases of many kinds.

Web Implementation of a Language and Culture Atlas
Jeanette Zerneke, UC Berkeley

ECAI affiliated projects collect language information from many different sources and present it in a variety of formats. Information about language usage, migration of speakers, locations of individual speakers and cultural groups as well as location of artifacts, which include written words, manuscripts and inscriptions, are all collected and mapped.

Several examples of language information usage in ECAI projects will be demonstrated showing the types of data collected, how it was processed, and ways it is used in web based projects. For the Pacific Language Mapping site, the maps in the Language Atlas of the Pacific are presented in multiple formats as a resource for others to use. The maps are presented as large scanned jpg images, tiled images, GIS shapefiles, and incorporated in TMJava dynamic map displays. In other projects, overlapping map layers can be used to show variations in language usage over time and give an indication of language migration. Other examples show how language maps are used to navigate to related resources or integrated with a variety of resources to profile a cultural area.

This project is an example of language and culture mapping dealing with the Yami of Orchid Island (Lan-yu) under the administration of Taiwan and ancestral connections to the Batanes, the northern islands province of the Philippines. The Batanes comprise an archipelago with inhabited islands, mainly Itbayat, Batan, and Sabtang along with Ibuhos, ranging south of the Bashi Channel.
The languages of the Batanes are classified as Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Western Malayo-Polynesian / Northern Philippine / Bashiic-Central Luzon-Northern Mindoro / Bashiic / Ivatan. The languages of the Yami and the Batanes are considered mutually intelligible with distinctions between islands and within islands.
In 2004 research was conducted to map the islands as an Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) project. The resources documented include (1) singing with heritage content, (2) boat construction, (3) languages, and (4) other historical and cultural aspects. This presentation illustrates the study process.

Key words: Orchid Island and the Batanes, Bashiic languages, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), language and culture documentation process.