Reengineering an Online Historical Dictionary for Readers of Specific Texts

• Tarrin Wills ^[1] ; Ellert Þór Jóhannsson ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Copenhagen

     University of Copenhagen

     Dinamarca

     
• Localización: Electronic lexicography in the 21st century. Proceedings of the eLex 2019 conference. 1-3 October 2019, Sintra, Portugal / Iztok Kosem (ed. lit.), Tanara Zingano Kuhn (ed. lit.), Margarita Correia (ed. lit.), José Pedro Ferreira (ed. lit.), Maarten Jansen (ed. lit.), Isabel Pereira (ed. lit.), Jelena Kallas (ed. lit.), Miloš Jakubíček (ed. lit.), Simon Krek (ed. lit.), Carole Tiberius (ed. lit.), 2019, págs. 116-129
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper presents an example of how a digital historical dictionary can be reengineered for new uses and new audiences, without changing the underlying data and editing processes. We start from the premise that a large proportion of users of historical dictionaries will be using them to read specific old texts as part of their studies or research in fields that use the texts as source material (literature, history, religion, etc.). Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) has a vast archive of digitized texts, together with detailed referencing sufficient, in theory, to generate a glossary for each page and line of the texts. For the feature demonstrated here we reverse the normal dynamic dictionary-generation process. Instead of generating dictionary entries, the application searches for citations on an edition page and generates a running glossary to the edition, displaying it alongside the edition text. In this paper we present the new public interface to the dictionary (currently at onp.ku.dk) and the contextual glossaries that are generated from the dictionary’s data. These have been developed using adaptive web technologies for use on a range of devices, including tablets and phones.