Dictionary Society of North America

Other lexicographical news

Two more items that may interest DSNA members:

In honour of the International Journal of Lexicography's 25th Anniversary, 10 articles have been
available for free for the anniversary year, here.

And, from the Columbia Spectator,  here's a profile of DSNA member Yin Yin Lu,  who recently founded the Columbia University Lexicography Society.

Petition Launched to Change the Definition of Marriage

According to this story in the Huffington Post:  New Hampshire resident Mike Raven is using Change.org to petition for a revision of the definition of marriage on dictionary.com. He is seeking more prominent placement for a definition that encompasses same-sex marriage, characterizing the current definition as "separate but equal, but not even." Reporter Amanda Terkel reports he's gathered about 5,000 signatures so far.

Alternatively, he could just to buy a new dictionary...

 

DSNA mission statement

At its 24 February 2012 meeting, the DSNA Executive Board approved the following mission statement for the Society:

The Dictionary Society of North America promotes the development, practice, and study of lexicography, and the use, compilation, curation, marketing, maintenance, and scholarly examination of dictionaries and related reference works. It provides forums for discussion and dissemination of information on all of these topics, including a peer-reviewed journal, a newsletter, a blog, and biennial meetings.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in English Language Lexicography

The Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford is looking for a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (vacancy ID 102775) who will pursue a research project in English Language
Lexicography (i.e. the academic study of dictionary-making - the practice, its products, their histories and their relationship to their cultural contexts) under the mentorship of DSNA member Charlotte Brewer. The proposed research project may be in any topic in English Language
Lexicography, but applications are particularly encouraged in areas relating to the OED, in dictionaries of current English, and in related areas of language technology such as language corpora.

The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English Language Lexicography will take up appointment between 1 September 2012 and 1 January 2013 and receive a salary in the range (as at 1 January 2012) of £29,099 - £30,870.

For further information about the job posting, view the PDF for vacancy ID 102775 at http://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk.

Columbia University Lexicography Society

The Society will meet on Friday, 27 April at 4 pm, for "a discussion of American regionalisms, as recorded by the Dictionary of American Regional English, as well as neologisms and various aspects of 21st-century usage, particularly as influenced by the Internet." Speaking will be John McWorter (of the Manhattan Institute, Columbia University, and The New Republic) and DSNA members Ben Zimmer (of the Visual Thesaurus and The Boston Globe) and lexicographer David K. Barnhart (The Barnhart Dictionary Companion). For more information and to register, visit this link to the Lexicography Society.

DSNA course at 2013 LSA Summer Institute

Next year, DSNA will again offer a course as part of the Linguistic Society's Summer Institute, to be held at the University of Michigan. DSNA president Orin Hargraves will be teaching a class on Natural Language Processing. Planning for the Institute is in the early stages, but you can visit the Summer Institute website, and in the meantime, savor the course description:

Determining what words mean is the core skill and practice of lexicography. Determining what words mean is also a central challenge in natural language processing (NLP), where it is usually classed under the exercise of word sense disambiguation (WSD). Until the late 2oth century, lexicography was dominated by scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, literature, and other humanistic disciplines, and the writing of dictionaries was based strongly on intuition, and only secondarily on induction from the study of examples of usage. Linguistics, in this same period, establish itself as a discipline with strong scientific credentials. With the development of corpora and other computational tools for processing text, dictionary makers recognized first the value, and soon the indispensability, of using evidence-based data to develop dictionary definitions, and this brought them increasingly into contact with computational linguists. The developers of computational linguistic tools and resources eventually turned their attention back to the dictionary and found that it was a document that could be exploited for use in the newly emerging fields of linguistic inquiry that computation made possible: NLP, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and machine translation. This course will explore the computational tools that lexicographers use today to write dictionaries, and the ways in which computational linguists use dictionaries in their pursuits. The aim is to give students an appreciation of the unexploited opportunities that dictionary databases offer to NLP, and of the challenges that stand in the way of their exploitation. Students will have an opportunity to explore the ways in which dictionaries may aid or hinder automatic WSD, and they will be encouraged to develop their own models for the use of dictionary databases in NLP.

 

DSNA Journal 1979-2011 now available on Project Muse

DSNA is delighted to announce that the entire run of our journal Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, is available on Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dictionaries/. Please note that the current issue (vol. 32) contains a topical index that may facilitate your browsing through the archives.

The passwords required for accessing Dictionaries on Project Muse were shared with current members last year; for new members, they appear in your welcome letter. If you have mislaid this information, please contact us.

 

DARE conference & party deadline fast approaches!

DSNA is helping to sponsor the upcoming DARE party and conference, and we hope there will be a good turnout of DSNA members in Madison this May. Don’t forget to reserve your hotel room and let the folks at DARE know you plan to attend. The deadlines for the listed prices at the two hotel blocks are TOMORROW and WEDNESDAY!

The mini-conference about DARE and American Dictionaries will take place in Madison on May 3 from 1:00 to 4:00. Speakers are Erin McKean, DSNA Vice President Michael Adams, and Simon Winchester. It will be held in the Alumni Lounge at The Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street.

And the party celebrating the publication of Volume V and the launch (next year) of the digital edition will be May 4 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. That celebration will be held at the Madison Club, at 5 East Wilson Street.

Rooms have been reserved at two hotels, but in order to receive the conference rate, THEY MUST BE RESERVED BY APRIL 2 (CAMPUS INN) OR APRIL 3 (HILTON).

CAMPUS INN; 601 Langdon Street; Deluxe Standard Single room $120; Toll-free number 1-800-589-6285; Group number: 118573; Group name: DARE; register online for the Campus Inn

HILTON MADISON MONONA TERRACE; 9 East Wilson Street; Single or double rate: $159; Toll-free number:  1-866-403-8838 or 414-935-5941;  Group name: DARE;  Group code: DARE;  register online for the Hilton Madison

For the conference, please respond by April 20 to DARE's office manager, Ginny Bormann (or 608-263-3810). For Friday's party, please register online by April. If you have questions, please contact Andrea Stoffel (608-265-9793).

DARE website

Most DSNA members have doubtless already discovered the new  DARE website created by the University of Wisconsin, listened to the audio, and taken the quiz (I did very very badly) but if not--have fun!

"Some words are budding, and some falling away"

So Dr. Johnson observed in his Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755; now a team of physicists and economists have published a study of the statistical patterns governing this growth cycle, based on the corpus of GoogleBooks. They examine the life cycles of words in English, Spanish and Hebrew. I did try to read the article, which is available in Scientific Reports, but it was way over my head. The graphs are a bit easier to follow. And here's a link to an article for us lay-folk, in the Wall Street Journal. Reporter Christopher Shea comments:

The authors even identified a universal "tipping point" in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, they either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse. The authors suggest that this may be because that stretch of decades marks the point when dictionary makers approve or disapprove new candidates for inclusion. Or perhaps it's generational turnover: Children accept or reject their parents' coinages.