Acquisition of the whole AIS, the Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Italy and Southern Switzerland

Abstract

The paper presents the results of the NavigAIS project, born to acquire the text of the whole AIS, the Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Italy and Southern Switzerland (Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz) (Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud, 1928-1940). The pro-ject was developed between 2009 and 2019 in three complementary phases: 1) the realiza-tion in 2009 of NavigAIS, a high resolution digital version of the AIS atlas, provided with a search and navigation engine, to allow the exploration of the 1705 maps contained in the atlas (www3.pd.istc.cnr.it/navigais). NavigAIS assured the real time access to the AIS maps to check on the field the speaker’s answers, during the recording sessions of AMDV (the Multimedia Atlas of Veneto Dialects) (www.pd.istc.cnr.it/amdv) in 2009-2010, and to implement the database of the AMDV lemma and the related AIS lemma collected in 1921 in the Veneto region; 2) the NavigAIS online version in 2014 (www3.pd.istc.cnr.it/navigais-web), which does not require a software installation; 3) In 2016, within the AIS Reloaded project (www.rose.uzh.ch/de/forschung/forschungamrose/projekte/AIS-reloaded.html), NavigAIS has been provided with a specific OCR, to acquire the AIS text in acceptable times. The estimate is to complete 50% of the AIS tables by the end of 2019.