A Review of LinguaSnapp: a Crowd-sourcing Mobile App for Mapping Linguistic Landscape

This paper offers a review of LinguaSnapp, a crowdsourcing smartphone app for collecting, archiving and analyzing linguistic landscape (LL) data. It compares the conventional linguistic landscaping process to the new mapping approach as provided by the LinguaSnapp app, which is specially designed to resolve the sore points of the old method with regards to data tagging, retrieval and geographic visualization. Also, this study gives a complete overview of the analytical descriptor menu of LinguaSnapp, namely, the submenus and choices within main menus of Language, Context and Analysis, which are at the core of this app that helps to describe the LL data photos in great detail. In addition, the advantages of the appointed editorial at the backend is also discussed. Furthermore, this paper probes into some of the potential drawbacks in LinguaSnapp, e.g. professional conceit may manifest in the editorial process, and the issues of copyright infringement and transfer.