Digital Humanities Day #3

As one might recall from an earlier talk at RUB Digital Humanities Day #2, there are quite a few published sources on Japanese pitch accent for many localities. These however are rarely organized in an intuitive way, and distilling a mental picture from these data on how accent is geographically distributed is not an easy task when staring at long lists of numbers. At Digital Humanities Day #2, we had a look at a possible visualization solution to help ease the task of judging accent distribution patterns, where accent patterns would be rendered as dots on a map of Japan, with different colours used for the place of the accent within the word at each location.

We have in the meantime come up with an implementation of such a solution. In honour of Atsushi Hiroto and Takamichi Ōhara, the authors of San'in Chihō No Akusento (1953) (The accent of the San’in area) on which this web application is based, we have named this web application ‘H+O Explorer’. It contains not only the data from this publication, but also all pertinent data from the ERC Starting Grant Project Japanese Prehistoric Migration, as far as they are available for the 141 nouns mentioned in Hiroto and Ōhara. This allows for diachronic comparison of accent data, and thus an unique opportunity to see if anything has changed accent-wise over the past 70 years. Together with displaying these data intuitively, consideration has also been given to accessibility and usability issues, such as the ability to compare distant areas with a split screen and to make high resolution snapshots for use in publications, and the ability to rapidly view the contents of a selected set of words in rapid succession to reveal trends that might pertain to historical word class (Martin 1987) or their phonological makeup.

References

Hiroto, Atsushiand Ōhara, Takamichi (1953). San'in Hougen No Akusento. Tokyo: Hōkōsha.

Martin, Samuel E. (1987). Japanese Language Through Time. New Haven and London:Yale University Press.