kernelPhil

Contains kernel smoothing tools designed for use by historical dialectologists and philologists for exploring spatial and temporal patterns in noisy historical language data, such as that obtained from historical texts. The main way in which these might differ from other implementations of kernel smoothing is that they assume that the function (linguistic variable) being explored has the form of the relative frequency of a series of discrete possibilities (linguistic variants). This package also offers a way of exploring distributions in 2-dimensional space and in time with separate kernels, and tools for identifying appropriate bandwidths for these.