Exploring Lemma Interconnections in Historical Dictionaries

In this paper we discuss the goals, motivations and other particularities of a visual exploratory analysis tool for historical dictionaries of the Bavarian dialects in Austria. As an input data set we employ the digitized version of the Historical Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects in Austria (Wo¨rterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in O¨ sterreich or WBO¨ ), an initiative started in 1963 which compiles more than five million paper slips collected during the years 1911-1998 in different
areas of current Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and northern Italy. In the 1990s these paper slips started to be progressively digitized, becoming part of the Database of Bavarian Dialects (DBO¨ ) and in 2010 nearly 32.000 records related to plant names were made available online on the DB¨O electronically-mapped (dbo@ema) platform1. In more recent efforts, the project exploreAT!: Exploring Austria’s Culture Through the Language Glass, which this work is part of, started in 2015. Its aim is “to reveal unique insights into the rich texture of the German Language, especially in Austria, by providing state of the art tools for exploring the unique collection (1911-1998) of the Bavarian Dialects in the region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”, and it has originated other publications in conference proceedings that we encourage the reader to review [8, 19].