In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Bulgarian Academy of Science published four volumes detailing the results of fieldwork done on Bulgarian dialects. This information is still extremely valuable for linguists today, but the data as presented in the printed volumes does not easily lend itself to analysis.
Combining this data with markup and the Google Maps API yields a new kind of dialect atlas that can generate statistics and display nuanced maps on the fly. This tool takes care of time-consuming data sorting and number crunching, allowing the scholar to focus on the analysis.
If you're not up on Bulgarian dialectology, you might want to peruse the Overview for Non-Linguists before getting started.
A font that supports Unicode 5.1 (such as Doulos SIL) is critical for the text to display right. In all seriousness-- the site looks awful and is practically unusable for linguistic purposes without it.
