Author Archives: D-AW

David-Antoine Williams. I’m an assistant professor of English at St Jerome’s University, in the University of Waterloo. See “About Me” page on the menu above for details.

How Indigenous American words came into English

I’ve been deep in the OED documentation of borrowings and loanwords for my look at “tramlines” [see my previous post, and look out for a few more to come] and OED’s treatment of foreign, about to be naturalized, and naturalized words. I got curious about some of the Indigenous American words in my dataset, and […]

05.05.2017 – 11:18 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

||-Tripping over tramlines-||

“Tramlines”, icydk, are those upright parallel bars that OED1 and OED2 editors used to indicate that a word was “alien or not fully naturalized”. So, for instance, zeitgeist you may recognize as a word of German origin, not infrequently heard in English. In OED1 (1928) it appeared as ||Zeitgeist, and this mark was preserved on […]

03.05.2017 – 09:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Three conferences this summer

After a baby-related travelling hiatus of a couple three years, TLOW is hitting the road this summer, with stops at Ryerson University in Toronto (just barely down the road, really) at the end of May, for the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities meeting at CFHSS Congress; then off to Barbados and the University of the […]

18.03.2017 – 16:35 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

One last round with metadata from Hathi and Underwood

In “Hathi’s Automatic Genre Classifier” and “Hathi Genre Again – Zero Recall“, I ran a couple of experiments comparing genre categories assigned by human taggers working on the Life of Words OED mark-up project to two sources of genre metadata associated with the HathiTrust Digital Library. The first post looked at data from the automatic […]

15.03.2017 – 13:50 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Poetry Competition Time

As part of our OMRI funding, LOW runs an annual poetry competition, open to all high school students in Ontario. Last year’s pilot run had a few dozen submissions, from which we picked one winner, two runners up, and twelve honorable mentions, all collected in our 2016 Anthology. Last year’s theme was “write a poem […]

12.03.2017 – 15:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry | Comments (0)

Shakespeare’s Earliest Citations in the OED

No author’s representation in the OED has received more comment than Shakespeare’s: if you ever come across a mention of OED citation evidence, more than likely it’s being used to substantiate (sometimes challenge or qualify) a claim that Shakespeare invented the most English words, or made up the most new meanings for existing words, or […]

06.03.2017 – 14:39 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED Subject Matter

In my last post I described using HathiTrust’s Solr Proxy API to fetch Hathi genre metadata for OED quotations. But genre is not the only metadata that Hathi sends back down the intertubes when I ask it a question. For most works, I also get a Library of Congress Classification code for the volume. This […]

06.02.2017 – 17:20 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Hathi Genre Again – Zero Recall

In “Hathi’s Automatic Genre Classifier” [17.01.06] I compared the consolidated automatic genre metadata for a subset of HathiTrust Digital Library texts (available here) to the genre classifications arrived at for human-inspected works as part of the OED quotation tagging project under-way at The Life of Words. My process there was pretty closely supervised, but the […]

06.02.2017 – 17:00 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

Hathi’s Automatic Genre Classifier

The HathiTrust Digital Library is a massive collection of digital books: As of 2017, it contains 5 billion pages from 15 million volumes (7 million titles). About 40% of these are public-domain works, meaning anyone can search and read them. Some of these have been marked for their textual genre. Here I do a little […]

06.01.2017 – 13:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED Gender Genre

In “Sex in the OED” I  ran through some figures on female vs male representation in OED quotation evidence, comparing the original OED1 with the later Supplements that resulted in OED2. Here I look a little closer at what kinds of works by women the two editions tended to cite. Below are two charts breaking […]

08.12.2016 – 10:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)