Visualizing conceptual spaces (ViCoS) in LEXUS

Introduction The language documentation projects of the DOBES program [1] are entering a new stage. In the first years of the program the projects were mainly occupied with the collection of video and audio recordings of a broad variety of spoken text genres in various contexts and socio-cultural interactions. Most of the material is described by metadata and stored in the archive for linguistic resources housed at the MPI [2], and part of the documented material is transcribed using ELAN [8]. For 45% of the documented languages lexica have been created, mostly using SIL’s Toolbox for linguists [3]. Entering the new stage, documentation teams are facing the challenge of data exploitation. Given the increasingly urgent purpose to help saving endangered languages from extinction, documentation could contribute to maintain and possible revitalize a documented language, and consequently, to present and preserve the cultural heritage of its speech community. This educational purpose complements the community-external purposes of linguists, ethnologists, and anthropologists.