By: George Moroz (https://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/103489498#teaching)
As all other types of visualization, linguistic mapping has two main goals: data presentation and data analysis. The most common purpose for which linguistic maps are used, is simply pointing to the location of one or more languages of interest (presentation). A more sophisticated task is showing the distribution of particular linguistic features or their combination among languages of a certain area (presentation and analysis). There are three linguistic subdisciplines that use maps for visualization: linguistic typology, areal linguistics and dialectology. lingtypology makes it easier to create all kinds of linguistic maps simplifying both: data presentation and data analysis.
The lingtypology package connects the Glottolog database (v. 2.7), which is a catalogue of the world’s languages with the leaflet package for interactive maps. This package helps researchers to make linguistic maps, using the philosophy of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project, which is creating uniform access to linguistic data. Let me walk you through some of its functionalities!
...
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://ropensci.org/blog/blog/2017/05/16/lingtypology