Title 1 Visualization as a Research Tool for Dialect Geography Using a Geo-browser 2

22 Moving from a traditional dialect geography research methodology to one in which data are processed 23 electronically and where visualization is used as a research tool can be of great benefit to dialect geography. 24 A working environment offering full support for using visualization as a research tool could take dialect 25 geography into the era of eScience. Despite the advent of electronic data processing, electronic publishing 26 and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), an analysis of the most important computerised tools for dialect 27 geography research suggests that there is little support for the use of modern data mining and analysis 28 techniques connected to visualization for the analysis and interpretation of dialect data. In this paper we use 29 the electronic publication of two major dialect dictionaries to illustrate the value of visualization as a 30 research tool by showing how visual data mining and combining dialect data with independent data sets 31 applies to dialect geography research. We argue that there is no need for large-scale software development 32 because visualization as a research tool is supported to a large extent by geo-browsers such as Google Earth 33 which make it possible to flexibly combine and visualize different types of geo-referenced data. 34