VerbaAlpina welcomes any support and offers various opportunities for active participation in the project work.
This involves, for example, transcribing data from printed sources such as language atlases and dictionaries and entering it into a database in a structured way, checking existing transcriptions for correctness or typifying material that has already been transcribed and assigning it to lexical lemmas. Comments are also welcome, e.g., on the origin and distribution of words or word types.
We are also very interested in current linguistic material that is not documented in published sources such as the aforementioned language atlases and dictionaries. If you have knowledge of a dialect spoken in the Alpine region, we would be pleased if you entered specific expressions of this dialect into the VerbaAlpina database. In this way, it will become possible to first enrich the existing data in the printed sources and, as a possible consequence, to recognise and observe dynamic processes of language change. This works all the better the more people participate in our project in this way. Do you have images of typically Alpine objects? Perhaps you have photos of Alpine pastures, huts, flora, fauna, mountains and landscape? Then upload them to our media library and include a note of where the picture was taken and when, what can be seen on it and – if known to you – a specific dialect expression to describe what is depicted.
Parallel to your individual collaboration with VerbaAlpina, you can set up your own research environment in our system, which you can use for the collection of (mainly, but certainly not exclusively) linguistic data. The only prerequisite is that the data can be georeferenced. While you have the option of keeping this data private, exclusively for your personal use, you can also make it accessible for other users to discuss and comment on. We encourage you to make as much of your data as possible available to the general public. This is the only way in which the potential of the database- and network-supported technologies can be fully realised.
To support VerbaAlpina and/or use the system for your own interests, it is necessary to register on our portal: https://doi.org/10.5282/verba-alpina?urlappend=%2Fwp-login.php%3Faction%3Dregister%26db%3D232