New Frameworks for Community-Informed Dictionary Work
Our in-progress Knowledgebase hosts a catalog of North American Indigenous language dictionaries and information on technology and digital tools for lexicography. Our goal for this resource is that it be used to assist those engaged in community-based dictionary projects by offering a place to review earlier work, and to learn about various current technologies that can be used to support dictionary projects. Both the ‘Dictionaries’ and the ‘Technologies’ pages are filterable, making information easier to locate.
Our dictionary scoping process involves identifying Indigenous languages spoken in North America, and searching for any print, online, PDF, or game (e.g. scrabble) dictionaries developed for a particular language. For each dictionary, we document information on authorship, how and if speakers were cited, when the dictionary was published, and if the dictionary is openly accessible.
To date, we have scoped over 1,000 dictionaries and have added over 600 of these to our fast-growing Knowledgebase. Posted entries can be filtered by language, language family, publication year (organized by decade), province(s)/state(s) in which the language is spoken, access conditions, and dictionary type (monolingual, bilingual, etc.).
We continue to add posts about individual dictionaries to the Knowledgebase, and hope to have information on all 1,000+ dictionaries available in the coming months. In the future, we plan to add more information on dictionaries that were unavailable at the time of scoping, such as dictionaries that are only available as print dictionaries, but may be accessible through our university library. We also wish to expand the regional search feature beyond provincial and state borders, and perhaps include a map interface.
Based on responses to our survey, and working from our own experiences with technologies for dictionary creation, we have also compiled a Knowledgebase of technologies and digital tools commonly used for lexicography. We designed this resource to assist those engaged in community-based dictionary projects to identify technologies best suited to their goals and work.
So far, we have fully scoped 18 technologies, and are working to add them as posts on the Knowledgebase. For each technology, we provide a summary about the technology, how it can and has been used, screenshots of the interface when available, highlights and considerations, any reviews or guides we have located, and relevant information on access, flexibility and data management (import/export/compatibility with other software and operating systems).