Interdisciplinary synergies : opening up new perspectives for data-driven research of the Southern Dutch Dialects

The Database of the Southern Dutch Dialects (DSDD) aims to aggregate and standardise three existing comprehensive lexicographic dialect databases of the Flemish, Brabantic and Limburgian dialects into one integrated dataset (Van Keymeulen, et al., 2019; Van Hout, et al., 2018, De Vriend, et al., 2006). In 2016, the Research Foundation Flanders funded a medium-scale research infrastructure project, the Database of Southern Dutch Dialects (DSDD)[1], which ran from 2017 until 2020 and resulted in a harmonised dataset of concepts (Van den Heuvel, et al., 2016), a user-friendly search engine and a geo-visualisation tool. The application backend provides an Application Programming Interface (API) which will be further developed and made available to researchers to export subsets of the data for analysis using existing digital research tools. At the previous DH Benelux conferences the project team introduced the project (2017), explored the cartographic tools (2018) and demonstrated the prototype (2019). Following the launch of the DSDD platform in 2020, the team will now present the importance of the interdisciplinary approach, the final results of the project, as well as future directions beyond the project lifetime.