Gabmap is a web application for dialectometrics and cartography. It allows you to make mappings and statistical analyses of your dialect data. For example, you collected the local variants of the pronunciation of a large number of words in several locations in some area. Using Gabmap you can compare the pronunciation of these words in the different dialects and make maps of the results.
In this tutorial, we focus on analyzing phonetic transcriptions. However, Gabmap can also be used for analyzing numeric dialect data (for example, formant frequencies) or categorical data (for example, syntactic or morphological variables).
Gabmap offers the following tools:
When you have uploaded your data in the web application you will get an overview of the number of places, number of linguistic variables, number of different symbols used in the transcriptions etc. An index map of the data locations is created and there is a possibility to create distribution maps of any specific variant(s) of a word or of a character.
Several of the analyses offered in Gabmap are based on aggregate linguistic distances between language varieties. String edit distance is used for measuring linguistic distances of transcription data. The linguistic distances are displayed in different ways on a number of maps. All maps and figures in Gabmap can be downloaded as image files.
With the statistical tools in Gabmap you can explore the structure of your dialect data. With multidimensional scaling you can explore to what extent the dialects form a continuum, while cluster analysis classifies the dialects and detects dialect areas. The results of the statistical analyses are displayed in maps and figures.