The WALS Sunburst Explorer
Combining areal and genealogical information of the WALS database

  1. Thomas Mayer
    Code on Github

The tool is best viewed in the two-column layout with a browser window size of minimum 1,000px and the map and sunburst widgets next to each other.

Feature

( see on WALS website)

Map



 

Sunburst


 

Description

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.

References

  • Bostock, Michael, Vadim Ogievetsky and Jeffrey Heer. 2011. D3: Data-driven documents. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 17(12), 2301–2309.

  • Dryer, Matthew S. 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language, 68(1), 81-138.

  • Dryer, Matthew S. and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/, Accessed on 2014-08-13.)

  • Mayer, Thomas, Bernhard Wälchli, Christian Rohrdantz and Michael Hund. 2014. From the extraction of continuous features in parallel texts to visual analytics of heterogeneous areal-typological datasets. In Nolan, Brian and Carlos Pascual-Periñán (eds.), Language processing and grammars: The role of functionally oriented computational models (SLCS) (Serie: Studies in Language). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13-38.

  • Rohrdantz, Christian, Michael Hund, Thomas Mayer, Bernhard Wälchli and Daniel A. Keim. 2012. The World’s Languages Explorer: Visual analysis of language features in genealogical and areal contexts. In Computer Graphic Forum, 31(3), 935–944. [ link]

  • Stasko, John and Eugene Zhang. 2000. Focus+context display and navigation techniques for enhancing radial, space-filling hierarchy visualizations. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 57–65. Los Alamitos CA: IEEE Computer Society.