Feature suggestion: compare languages

[nclm]

I’m not a linguist so I cannot say how useful this would be for research, but just as someone curious about languages, one of the first thing I found myself looking on the website was a way to compare languages.

You would select two (or more if the feature gets more advanced) and be able to compare features across them.

Could be shown as two lists, “what’s the same” and “what’s different”.

Could be shown as a table of all features and the values for each selected languages.

[HedvigS]

Dear @nclm . Comparison is already possible on the feature page: https://grambank.clld.org/parameters/GB020#2/21.0/151.7

But perhaps we should make this clearer, and we could refine it further. We've discussed having a orientation of tools page, but we haven't had time to implement it yet.

@johenglisch maybe we can start a document somewhere with a draft for this page? I have it on my to do-list but I haven't had time for it, and having a shared document with you might spur me to wrap it soon :)

[johenglisch]

Hm, the link you posted takes two features and compares those. I think the original comment meant that it should be possible to chose two languages and look at their different feature values.

The closest thing we have is the the language family page, which lets you look at the feature values for an entire language family and the button which lets you look at values for a specific feature for a specific family:

But that's a bit hard to find, too (PR #49 makes things a bit more visible by adding another button on the feature page but that didn't get merged in time for the release).

The general question is how many of these visualisation tools we want to build into the webapp. I think the more specific questions get the more I'd lean towards just cutting the middle man, downloading the underlying CLDF data directly, and doing all the analysis/visualisation in R, Python, etc.

@HedvigS regarding a shared document: You could just make a new branch in this repo and start editing the help page there (and maybe also create a Draft PR for a discussion thread).

[HedvigS]

@johenglisch ah, of course. you are so right, I don't know how I misunderstood that!

[HedvigS]

@nclm i'm working on content for a help page for grambank.clld.org, including instructions for viewing feature values on a tree. What do you think?

https://github.com/grambank/grambank/wiki/Grambank-clld-web-site-help-page#feature-on-tree