Thanks to a collaboration between the Multilingual Manchester research unit and the University’s Research IT group, students and citizens in Saint Petersburg will now have access to a Russian version of LinguaSnapp - The University of Manchester’s mobile app for documenting language landscapes.

Nicolas Gruel, a research software engineer from Research IT has been working with Prof Peter Pormann (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures) to easily compare interpretations and translations of a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works associated with the physician Hippocrates.

Researchers in English Linguistics from the School of Arts, Languages and Culture were keen to enhance an existing project website, which allows visitors to view scans and transcriptions of historic documents from the John Rylands collection. A series of enquiries eventually lead them to the Research Software Engineers in Research IT.

Research IT members recently took part in a University of Manchester Digital Humanities workshop – “Introduction to data, the command line and automating tasks for the digital humanities”. The workshop was led by Jez Cope, Research Data Manager, University of Sheffield Library and support was provided by Gerard Capes and David Mawdsley (Research IT, UoM).

A mobile phone app developed by Research IT has been hitting the headlines recently. Featured on ITV news and Granada Reports as well as in The Daily Mirror, the Manchester Evening News and local newspapers across the region, Linguasnapp is enabling researchers to identify the range of languages used in Manchester.

LinguaSnapp is a project to create multilingual landscape maps of cities round the world by crowdsourcing data from the public. Last year Research IT created a mobile app and web application for the project to focus on the city of Manchester.

Do you use maps, mapping technologies and/or methods in your research? Would you like to develop your research in this area?

The Geography Department, Digital Humanities@Manchester, Methods@manchester and the John Rylands Library are running a joint workshop on Monday 13th June to identify researcher needs in this area across the Faculty of Humanities.