Language Map of BC

This 12 month web-mapping project resulted in an interactive map that showcases British Columbia First Nations' rich linguistic diversity. The map and website detail the spatial locations of languages, First Nations, and interconnections. It is also the authoritative source for the status and health of aboriginal languages in BC.

First People's Heritage Language and Culture Council has a rich language revitalization dataset. They had an old map website that used proprietary software that was slow, difficult to update and 'design challenged' (cartographically). We custom built a web-map system using Drupal and Open Layers that fit their needs. Exploration of languages through the map is intuitive and quick. Updates are simple as the maps are rendered on the fly from the underlying database.

In addition to this new web-mapping functionality, we re-styled the map extensively (using transparency to show that language borders are not 'hard'), and we built a form-based language survey input tool which reduces the time/effort to ingest yearly survey returns to a fraction of the original time required. The beauty of the system is that the survey results are automatically processed and reports (tables) are automatically updated as soon as new survey data is added. All this with high levels of website security.