Monday, August 15, 2005
Online Language Lab
I've just been playing with the BBC's Language Lab, using their Flash tool to create my own Word Map. You enter the words you use for common concepts like rain, sleep, items of clothing etc, and build your own concept map. The application is very simple, and you just end up with collections of words around concepts, but what's cool is that for every word you enter you get to see a regional map showing how much it is used. For many of the words I entered, I was left wondering just how many people had responded, because the results were not what I expected, so I'd like to see more indication of the reliability of the results, but it's fun to enter words I remember from my origins in the North of England and see them crop up only in the north of the map. How many people know what 'bairn' means?
I like this site because it's a way of both gathering data from a geographically distributed sample, and also of displaying that data in a meaningful way. I'd like to know more about they chose the categories though - I've got plenty of Northern phrases (and Stokie ones too now that I live round there) that I couldn't see space for in my concept map.
I've just been playing with the BBC's Language Lab, using their Flash tool to create my own Word Map. You enter the words you use for common concepts like rain, sleep, items of clothing etc, and build your own concept map. The application is very simple, and you just end up with collections of words around concepts, but what's cool is that for every word you enter you get to see a regional map showing how much it is used. For many of the words I entered, I was left wondering just how many people had responded, because the results were not what I expected, so I'd like to see more indication of the reliability of the results, but it's fun to enter words I remember from my origins in the North of England and see them crop up only in the north of the map. How many people know what 'bairn' means?
I like this site because it's a way of both gathering data from a geographically distributed sample, and also of displaying that data in a meaningful way. I'd like to know more about they chose the categories though - I've got plenty of Northern phrases (and Stokie ones too now that I live round there) that I couldn't see space for in my concept map.
Comments:
Post a Comment
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS