LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), an Index of Sources, and dot maps showing the distribution of textual dialect features.
[2] Public access to a fully tagged, syntactically annotated corpus should provide unprecedented scope for phonological, lexico-grammatical, semantic, pragmatic as well as dialectal inquiry into a period marked by rapid linguistic change but also by a paucity of surviving texts.
Tolkien was able to conjecture the AB literary dialect by comparing manuscripts of the Katherine Group ("B") and the Ancrene Wisse ("A").
Problematically, though, such varieties might not reflect the geographic areas of composition, since scribes often traveled to copying centers from far afield.
This and other problems arising from the diversity of scribal practices (e.g. literam, or literal, and mischsprache, or mixed-language copying) placed a premium on texts of explicit local provenance to anchor dialectal domains.
The period covered by LAEME is of prime grammatical and phonological interest, as the language was undergoing widespread inflectional loss from OE but at different rates in different regions.
Because LAEME's anchor matrix is thin and patchy, its dialectal fits are informed approximations subject to revision.
[6] The above complexities and complications have obliged LAEME's architects to build the atlas around a digitized corpus of lexico-grammatically tagged texts that can be searched and compared according to the research needs of users.
[9] Independent searchability multiplies LAEME's usages across disciplines, as scholars and researchers can generate their own Form and Tag Dictionaries, Feature Maps, and Concordances.
Users begin by selecting a tag type (suffixes, grammatical words, inflection, lexis), entering a search string, and then a position limiter (initial, medial, final).