January 2024: The special issue of Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America was covered in a UBC Language Sciences news release. 

December 2023: Christine and Mark were invited to serve as guest editors of an open access special issue of Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America focused on lexicography for Indigenous languages, which was published at the end of December 2023. The volume includes an article by members of our project team: An Open-Access Toolkit for Collaborative, Community-Informed Dictionaries, which details the Relational Lexicography Knowledgebase and the framework of Relational Lexicography, as well as a review of PT Anderson’s book Revitalization Lexicography: The Making of a New Tunica Dictionary written by Bailey Trotter. 

June 2023: Christine and Mark held a very successful roundtable in June of 2023 on Relational Lexicography: New Frameworks for Community-Informed Dictionary Work with Indigenous Languages at the 24th Biennial Dictionary Society of North America Conference in Boulder, Colorado. The roundtable brought together Indigenous language champions with anthropologists and linguists who are actively collaborating on dictionary projects for First Nations languages in British Columbia and Quebec, Canada. Outgoing president Ed Finegan’s mentioned the roundtable in his keynote address “A Life in Lexicography”, when he said, “I envy the many participants at this Boulder conference creating dictionaries of North American Indigenous languages in the framework of relational lexicography”.

March 2023: Bailey, Christine, Victoria, Mark, and Meryl presented at the International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation. Entitled An Open Access Toolkit for Collaborative, Community-Informed Dictionaries, the presentation discussed our Dictionaries Knowledgebase in the context of language justice. The video presenation can be found on YouTube.

June 2022: Bailey gave a guest lecture in FNEL 480: Endangered Language Documentation and Revitalization at UBC Vancouver. She guided students with no prior coding experience to build their own version of the word game ‘Wordle’ by following Aidan Pine’s ‘How to make a Wordle clone for your language’ guide. Using Aidan Pine’s open source adaptation of an existing Wordle clone students were able to create fully functioning online versions of Wordle for the language of their choice. The slides from this presentation, which introduce Wordle, and go through setup needed prior to following Aidan Pine’s guide, can be viewed or downloaded by clicking here. A document, adapted from the pre-class material, which details how to prepare for building a Wordle can be found here. 

May 2022: Research Assistant Aiyana Twigg wins the Lieutenant-Governor medal for work on Indigenous language revitalization. Read the article on the Terrace Standard here, or as a PDF here.   

April 2022: Our Dictionaries Knowledgebase was soft-launched, with information on approximately 600 of the 1000+ dictionaries we have identified and scoped. More information can be found on our website’s Knowledgebase page, while the Knowledgebase can be viewed here. The Technologies portion of the Knowledgebase can be viewed here.

March 2022: Julia gave a guest lecture in FNEL 382: Lexicography for Endangered Languages at UBC Vancouver, where she gave an overview of the project and presented the preliminary findings from the survey analysis. The slides from this presentation can be viewed or downloaded by clicking here. 

May 2021: Mark, Christine and Julia gave a 20-minute video presentation about the survey at the International Conference of Language Documentation and Conservation. The presentation is entitled Surveying community-based dictionary creators to develop a Relational Lexicography toolkit and framework and focuses on the first 50 survey responses. 

Victoria, Ben and Meryl gave a 20-minute video presentation on the first stages of the Dictionary Knowledgebase at the International Conference of Language Documentation and Conservation. The presentation is titled Resources for Reclamation: Creating a Relational Dictionary Knowledgebase.

March 2021: we launched an Online Survey asking about people’s work on community-based dictionary projects for Indigenous and other historically-marginalized languages in North America (and beyond). The survey is now closed. You can find more information our survey page. 

April 2020: The Relational Lexicography project was covered by UBC Language Sciences on 23 April 2020. Click on the image below to read the article.