The Dictionary of Old English and the final design of its computer system

Abstract

In June 1983, at a session chaired by Paul Bratley at the International Conference on Computing in the Humanities in Raleigh, North Carolina, I described what I thought was the final design of the computer system for the Dictionary of Old English. I have since discovered that the configuration for a computer system is seldom as final as one would wish. So I begin in truly medieval fashion with a retraction: the Dictionary of Old English did not purchase the Xerox STAR system about which I spoke at length in 1983. However, with a generous gift from the President of the University of Toronto, we were able to purchase a system which we think is superior, but which incori porates those features of STAR we found most attractive. The University hoped that our system might eventually also serve as a general humanities text processing and publication system.It is within this larger context I would like to begin. On the fourteenth floor of Robarts Library, where the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) has its offices, members of the Department of East Asian Studies presently hand-letter for their students exercises in Japanese; the Department of Religious Studies works with texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Coptic; the Zola Project produces editions in French; the Comparative Literature program trains students of Italian, German, and Spanish Literature; the Department of Middle Eastern Studies teaches Arabic; and the Dictionary of Old English makes use of those letters foreign to the Latin alphabet ae, ~, and p. What we all have in common is the need for text-editing and fast publishing, and some of us have the further need for a special alphabet or special character sets. Any computer system that wilt be useful to the humanities Antonette diPaolo Healey is on the staff of the Dictionary of Old English at the University of Toronto. must be capable of processing a heavy volume of words, have access to high-quality laser printer, and be able to handle a range of written languages.Several other concerns of the DOE are due in part to the nature of our material and in part to the nature of the research tool we are trying to produce. Describing our project and our own requirements may show that this information has wider application. The dictionary was conceived by Angus Cameron 15 years ago as an historical dictionary in the tradition established by Sir James Murray for the masterly Oxford English Dictionary. Splendid as it is the OED never intended to provide adequate treatment of Old English vocabulary. Murray was interested in recording the history of a word from its first appearance in the language until modem times. A word that did not survive beyond the Old English period (i.e., beyond 1150) is not included. Cameron therefore saw the DOE as taking its place together with the Middle English Dictionary as one of the period dictionaries of the language. Just as the Middle English Dictionary provides a comprehensive historical record of English vocabulary between 1100 and 1500, the DOE would document the earliest period of the ...

Digitization of data for a historical medical dictionary

“…All three dictionaries are now available as searchable electronic versions, and the challenges posed by their computerization have been discussed in a variety of articles and books (e.g. Gray 1986;Healey 1985;Venezky 1988;Logan 1991;Elliott and Williams 2006;Weiner 2009;Gilliver 2016).…”

Unseen users, unknown systems: Computer design for a scholar's dictionary

“…The text corpus resides on-line, along with other large databases referenced by the editors, including a complete concordance to the texts, the short-title list, the headword list, the frequency list, and an index to OE word studies (Cameron, Kingsmill, & Amos, 1983). The basic configuration before the donation by Xerox of four workstations and a fileserver is described by Healey (1985).…”

Electronic lexicography

“…and the Italian Dizionario storico integrale delle lingua italiana undertaken by the Accademia della Crusca in 1964 (Duro, 1968;Zampolli, 1973;Nencioni, 1990). During the 1970s, the Old Spanish Dictionary became computerized in 1971 (Nitti, 1978;Burrus, 1983), and the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) was conceived at the beginning of the decade as a fully computerized dictionary (Bessinger, 1968;Leyerle, 1971;Bratley and Lusignan, 1976;Healey, 1985). These dictionaries have continued bearing fruit throughout the 1980s: the Old Spanish Dictionary project published the complete concordance and texts of 14th century Aragonese MSS in 1982 (Burrus, 1983), DARE published its first volume, A--C, in 1985, andDOE published the letter C in 1988.…”