Crowdsourcing for a Geographical and Social Mapping of Italian Dialects

Linguistic field research depends on collecting phrases and sentences as well as their geographical and social characteristics. The traditional method of field research –researchers asking questions and filling forms– is time-consuming, costly, and not free of biases. This article presents metropolitalia, a Web-based crowdsourcing platform for linguistic field research aiming at overcoming some of the drawbacks of traditional linguistic field research. metropolitalia is built upon Agora, a market for trading with phrases and speculating on their characteristics in a playful manner. Two games are run under Agora, Borsa Parole and Poker Parole, that aim at collecting complementary data and meta-data: Borsa Parole incites players to express their own knowledge or, rather, beliefs, Poker Parole incites players to make conjectures on the beliefs of others, thus enhancing the primary meta-data collected with Borsa Parole with secondary, or reflexive, metadata needed for language perception studies. This article describes Agora with both games and reports on first evaluations of the data gathered so far.