Special Issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics: Introduction

The advent of ever-largerand more diverse historical corpora for different historical periods and linguistic varieties has led to the impossibility of obtaining simple, direct —and yet balanced—representations of the core patterns in the data. In order to draw insights from heterogeneous and complex materials of this type, historical linguists have begun to reach for a growing number of data visualisation techniques, from the statistical, to the cartographical, the network-based and beyond. An exploration of the state of this art was the objective of a workshop at the 2018 International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, from whence most of the materials of this Special Issue are drawn. This brief introductory paper outlines the background and relevance of this line of methodological research and presents a summary of the individual papers that make up the collection.