7/ The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of the two godfathers of language cartography, Georg Wenker, of Germany, and Jules Gilliéron, of Switzerland.
They were the first to place maps at the absolute front and centre of their atlases, and developed many of the key design and data collection principles used today.
Wenker's "Sprachatlas" lives on today in digital form at the University of Marburg: https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb09/dsa/projects/completed-projects/diwa
8/ Broadly speaking, Wenker is famous for using "indirect data collection" techniques.
His first major work involved sending a questionnaire of 40 standardised sentences to school by mail. It was translated into dialects by pupils or teachers in about 40,000 locations in Germany, and the collected data on variants was plotted by hand onto over 1,500 maps.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Sprachatlas#Wenkers%C3%A4tze
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