The WALS Sunburst Explorer shows the values for all WALS
features by combining the geolocation of the respective languages with their genealogy in
a sunburst visualization
(Stasko and Zhang 2000). The map and the sunburst is enhanced with interactive functionalities.
You can select a region in the world map to get only those languages spoken in that area
displayed in the sunburst. The sunburst itself is zoomable. If you click on a segment, only
the languages of the respective subfamily are displayed.
All data for the WALS Sunburst Explorer (including the genealogical information) has been taken from WALS Online (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013). WALS Online data export created 2013-10-29 23:06:51.451389 from http://wals.info/. The macro areas are adapted from Dryer (1992).
If you use the WALS Sunburst Explorer in your research, please cite the fourth paper in the References section (Mayer et al. 2014). The WALS Sunburst Explorer is based on the World's Languages Explorer
by Christian Rohrdantz, Michael Hund, Thomas Mayer, Bernhard Wälchli and Daniel A. Keim
(Rohrdantz et al. 2012).
The WALS Sunburst Explorer is implemented in JavaScript using the D3 library (Bostock et al. 2011). The ordinal scale is taken from Cynthia Brewer's colorbrewer.
This work has been funded by the DFG project
“Algorithmic corpus-based approaches to typological
comparison” at the Philipps-Universität Marburg.