Geospatial mapping of a historical hybrid language in the Mediterranean basin

This project aims to provide a comprehensive data source for forms of language termed the Mediterranean Lingua Franca throughout the history of Europe. This language was a hybrid language, made up of bits of what we today call French, Italian, Spanish etc. The project maps the various linguistic forms, sources, and places of language which has been termed lingua franca across the Mediterranean. This language has been recorded in 49 documents that have come down to us, the earliest from c.1204 and the latest was written in 1887. The project builds on a prototype database launched in 2022 (https://joshbrownwa.wixsite.com/mlfd), which allows researchers to search for linguistic data in just one of these documents.

The proposed project would take advantage of the online software Recogito, providing a more comprehensive database of linguistic forms which can be easily searched for linguistic data deemed to belong to the Mediterranean Lingua Franca. This software allows for a broader mapping exercise to take place, tracing where the language appeared around the Mediterranean, at which time, and in which documents. It also allows hyperlinks to be embedded in the data so that users can easily cross-reference particular historical figures, toponyms, and other references. I would be happy to discuss with the team any other software they could suggest.

While projects of geospatial mapping have been carried out before on historical languages (especially on Latin and Ancient Greek), to my knowledge there are none that work specifically with forms of hybrid language, and none which provide a comprehensive database of a well-studied language such as the Mediterranean Lingua Franca. This is a major desideratum in studies of this field, and digital approaches to multilingual text anlaysis are now progressing apace (Brown In Press; 2023).

In Press. Brown, Joshua. Digital approaches to multilingual text analysis: the Dictionnaire de la langue franque and its morphology as hybrid data in the past. In Paul Spence and Lorella Viola (Eds). Multilingual Digital Humanities. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities.

2023. Brown, Joshua. Whose language? Whose DH? Towards a taxonomy of definitional elusiveness in the digital humanities. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38(2): 501-514. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac072

Client


Contact: Josh Brown
Phone: 0423 684 138
Email: [email protected]
Preferred contact: Email
Location: Arts Building, room 2.07 (Italian Studies), UWA Crawley Campus

IP Exploitation Model


The IP exploitation model requested by the Client is: Creative Commons (open source) http://creativecommons.org.au/


Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
The University of Western Australia
Last modified: 14 July 2023
Modified By: Michael Wise 		UWA