'All the world exists to end up in a dictionary' 

Dr Julianne Nyhan

( j.nyhan@ucl.ac.uk)http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/julianne-nyhan/

http://tinyurl.com/36wmgnx

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944)

Support of Tsar Nicholas II undertook survey of Russian empire 1909-1912

“He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images”. http://tinyurl.com/36wmgnx

Aims of today's talk:

1. View the concept of the dictionary through the metaphor of the red, green and blue 'filter' (i.e. dictionaries at the interface of culture, humans, technology), 2. My ultimate aim is to prompt you to reflect on the importance of such 'filters' and how our understanding of them may influence the remediation of dictionaries in the digital world, or the way we might bring those filters together to reveal a new picture of the dictionary3. Overview of where we are in digital humanities and where we may be going

Why?     

Lexicographer ... 'a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.' Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, J. & P. Knapton, London. 1775.

Authoritarian and conservative tradition of dictionaries: “I'll check it in THE dictionary”

Dictionaries: a bit niche, a bit boring and when the size and scale of the Web is considered, one might wonder whether dictionaries have had their day? 

A historical dictionary sets out Each word's existence in different periods, places and genres The changes in the word's meaning, use, form and spelling Its idiomatic phrases and habitual collocations Its external, or comparative, etymology as well as its internal

derivation Its morphological and syntactic features. Its stylistic and statistical characteristics.

R. Merkin, 'The historical/academic dictionary', R. K. K. Hartman (ed), Lexicography: practice and principles (London 1983) 123-33: 123.

A light introduction: filter 1 on curious words

blinn, blind (AS or ON blind. ….) Expld. as dead person's spittle, filament (nerve ?) of a dead person's eye: …

eDIL, http://tinyurl.com/2wo3py4

Found only in medieval Irish glossaries

A light introduction: filter 1 on curious words

éccruth

u, m. (neg. of cruth) disfigurement, loss of beauty, freq. used of transformation through grief, rage or fear

eDIL, http://tinyurl.com/2vcbyek

Dictionaries are not only about words …

Dictionaries make accessible successive snapshots of our world knowledge

Key place to study the technologies of the book and the tools and techniques that have been developed to order and make accessible such knowledge

Images of the dictionary

When I mention the word 'dictionary' which one pops into your head?

What form and format is it in?

How is it ordered?

© The British Museum 2011.

Technologies of the book

Today absolute alphabetical order is predominant

This has not always been so, and as innocuous a technique as it may seem, throughout history its development and application appears to have interacted in complex ways with such factors as learning, philosophy, technology, economics and material culture.

Ordering structures in a nutshell 1 Absolute alphabetisation was known and used in ancient Ancient

Greece, Galen's Interpretation of the Hippocratic glosses is considered to be the earliest example of a work that displays absolute alphabetisation.

It was not used in Latin lexicographical works compiled in antiquity and so the technique was lost to western Europe. In Roman Antiquity and the middle ages thematic organisation held sway.

In some glossaries of the middle ages we see attempts to work it out again. Two issues have been especially highlighed by historians: technology and the prevailing world view

Ordering structures in a nutshell 2

'Alphabetisation may also have been offensive to the global scholastic view of things. It must have seemed a perverse, disjointed and ultimately meaningless way of ordering material to men who were interested in neat frames for the containing of all knowledge'. Tom McArthur, Worlds of reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer (Cambridge 1986) 24-26.

Ordering structures in a nutshell 3 From the thirteenth century onwards absolute order becomes more

prevalent. The two medieval Latin works that achieved absolute alphabetisation were completed quite close together: the first was the Summa of Guillelmus Brito published in 1272. This was closely followed by the Catholicon of Giovanni di Genoa (also referred to as Balbus and Johannes Januensis de Balbis).

Daly and Daly state that the Catholicon was probably the first Latin dictionary to be printed with movable type and was printed on vellum at Mainz in 1460, probably by Gutenberg. Daly & Daly, Some techniques 237.

However, absolute alphabetisation does not become wide spread until the advent of the printing press and does not become predominant until at least the sixteenth century.

Why is this relevant? 'If we are to build genres that are as

least as powerful as the old ones,

we need to understand in their own

terms what the makers of the codex

genres were trying to do'. Willard

McCarty, Guest Editorial,

Interdisciplinary Science

Reviews 2005, Vol. 30, No. 2,

97-101:98.

Dictionaries and Digital Humanities

Prototype lexicon of medieval Irish

TextGrid

Dictionaries in the million book library

Skeletal XML Lexicon entry

<entry id=“B124”>

<lemma></lemma> ➔ Headword

<gramgrp pos="nn"></gramgrp> Grammatical information

<etym></etym> Etymology

<syntax.gr>

<syntax></syntax> Syntax

</syntax.gr>

<senses><sense n="1"></sense></senses> Definitions

<forms><form.gr>

<form></form> Word forms

</form.gr></forms>

</entry>

Skeletal XML Lexicon entry

<entry id=“B124”>

<lemma></lemma> ➔ Headword

<gramgrp pos="nn"></gramgrp> Grammatical information

<etym></etym> Etymology

<syntax.gr>

<syntax></syntax> Syntax

</syntax.gr>

<senses><sense n="1"></sense></senses> Definitions

<forms><form.gr>

<form></form> Word forms

</form.gr></forms>

</entry>

TextGrid

Establish a modular Virtual Research Infrastructure for text scientistsVirtual Research Environment (VRE) for collaborative work with distributed resources

TextGridLab with tools and services

Build a Data GridVirtual archive for long-term data preservation

TextGridRep (repository)

Interconnect Arts and Humanities scholars, IT professionals and information specialists on grid-based platform

More information

http://www.textgrid.de

Beta version for download:

http://www.textgrid.de/beta.html

Video demo:

Question

Dictionaries in automated systems

Central pillars of e-Science platforms such as TextGrid

Machine translation systems Named entity recognition Searching corpora of handwritten

MSS Linked data

What to do with a million books? Herodotus has the Athenian sage Solon estimate the lifetime of a human

being at c. 26,250 days A book a day: 30 generations to read through even a moderate collection of a

million books and 10,000 years to cover the 10 million-or-so unique items in the Harvard Library system

A completed Google Library, based on the collections of the current partners, would probably contain more than ten million items

“Only machines can process or ‘read,’ much less analyze the written record of humanity”

(Crane 2006b Crane, G. "What Do You Do with a Million Books." D-Lib Magazine, 12:3 (2006), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/crane/03crane.html )

The current pictureDigital editions of historical dictionaries: to what

extent are we rethinking and reimagining the importance of the dictionary, whether for the individual or for the incredible problems and opportunities of the multi-million work library?

See especially for intro: Gregory Crane and Alison Jones 2006. 'Text, Information, Knowledge and the Evolving Record of Humanity'. D-Lib Magazine 12:13. http://tinyurl.com/6rpxb2

In conclusion

 

"Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre" (Stéphane Mallarmé)   

“All the world exists to end up in a dictionary”