_Metropolitalia_ is an online platform where Italian native speakers can test their knowledge of their language. It is a so-called “game with a purpose” (GWAP), which means the community of users may, on the one hand, enjoy the game and compete with one another and, on the other hand, contribute to collecting and assessing language data (expressions in regional vernaculars and dialects). _Metropolitalia_ is a platform for linguistic field research and its aim is to gather data from a large number of different speakers; in traditional field studies it is impossible to collect data from so many people. This platform may be used not only by researchers but also by the players themselves, as here they can check how the majority of speakers assessed specific expressions. 

In each round, the player is presented with three examples, each consisting of a typical regional expression (phrase or whole sentence). By clicking on a map, the player assigns a location (supraregional, regional or local) to an expression. At the same time, the player bets on how many other players share his or her assessment of a specific expression’s origin. Bets are stored and compared to those of the other players; points are awarded according to the degree of agreement between the players’ assessments. A player’s points go up or down, depending on these assessments, as more people play. Hence the number of points awarded is not constant but varies depending on the community’s assessments. The objective of the game is to accumulate as many points as possible and make the list of top scorers.

The objective of the project is to collect authentic data on geographic variation in the Italian language, while taking other parameters that have an influence on language usage (sex, age, level of education) into account. “Beneath” the game’s surface, a database has been set up that collects primary and meta data from the Italian language, in particular, from the field of regional and social dialects. The data results from the assessment of the players who tag the appropriate forms in the database. This makes it possible to study, for instance, the formative influence of big cities on the dynamics of linguistic variation, or to reexamine common hypotheses on the degree of markedness of expressions.


Links: www.metropolitalia.org

Conceived and developed by Thomas Krefeld, Stephan Luecke, Francois Bry, Fabian Kneissl and Christoph Wieser

With the help of Caterina Campanella, Silvia Cramerotti, Debora Francione, Katharina Jakob, Alessandra Puglisi and Andre Reichstaller.

Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the research project play4science (in cooperation with Hubertus Kohle)

_Metropolitalia_ is an interdisciplinary initiative launched by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Institute for Romance Philology; and Institute for Informatics/Teaching and Research Unit Programming and Modeling Language) and aims, within the scope of the digital humanities, at harnessing the potential of “games with a purpose” for the humanities as a whole.