Within linguistics, the use of large sets of data via a combination of rule-based and stochastic methods is now standardly part of the analysis of language structure. However, though scatter plots, bar or pie charts, and trees as provided by R, for example, are standardly used, novel visual computation techniques have only just begun to be explored. The overall aim of this project is to evaluate whether visual analytics indeed represents a methodology that can yield improved results for linguistic research and to establish metrics for the evaluation of visual analytics approaches by conducting linguistically motivated case studies on historical data.