The project VerbaAlpina has been planned from the beginning with regard to suitability for the web as it wants to contribute to the transferring of established arts traditions (more precisely of geolinguistics), to the digital humanities (cf. Krefeld/Lücke/von Ehrlich 2014, Jannidis/Kohle/Rehbein 2017, Krefeld 2020b).
This means as follows:
(1) The empirical basis of the research consists in data (cf. Schöch 2013), e.g. in digitally codified and structured units or at least in units that can be structured. The data the project is dealing with are partly already published data which are digitised secondarily (as e.g. the older material out of atlases), but partly also new data which still have to be collected. With regard to the relevant concepts the new data shall be as extensive as possible. Therefore, the method is quantitative and to a great extent inductive.
(2) The research communication takes place on the medial conditions of the internet. This allows to intertwine hypertextually different media (writing, picture, video and sound). Furthermore, the persons who are participating in the project either as researchers (especially as project partner) and/or as informants can communicate and cooperate with each other continuously.
(3) The interested researchers are offered to collaborate on the development of this collaborative research platform based on the project. This perspective is useful and gets the project further at least in two respects: it permits to integrate different sites and to make progress with the combination of information technology and linguistic geography by using public resources, i.e. without being forced to fall back upon the (legally and economically difficult) support of private IT companies.
(4) The knowledge which is relevant for the project can also continuously be accumulated and modified for a fairly long time although the guarantee of a lasting availability is still difficult to realise technically (cf. to this the important research infrastructure of CLARIN-D http://www.clarin-d.de/en/). Anyhow, the publication of the results on real media (books, CDs, DVDs) is no fundamental request anymore. Nevertheless, a secondary print option is set up, a solution the online lexicography offers occasionally, as e.g. the exemplary Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini.