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.

Burchfield’s Reach-Backs

The vast majority of the quotation evidence in Robert Burchfield’s OED Supplements comes from after the first (1928) edition was completed. The median date for these is 1944, whereas for the first edition it’s 1742. However, in some circumstances the Supplements did reach back into periods already covered by OED1 — if it could antedate […]

06.12.2016 – 10:59 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Sex in the OED

Two subprojects concerning OED quotation metadata are now near enough to complete to present some preliminary results. They concern the sex of the authors quoted in the OED, in both the first edition (1928) and the later Supplements (1933, 1972-86). The most focused work on this question so far has been Baigent, Brewer, and Larminie, […]

02.12.2016 – 17:21 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Entitled Professor

I happen to have an interest and a certain amount of expertise in words that mean their own opposites. You might say I’m qualified to post here on that topic. You might even say I’m entitled to my opinion on a wider range of things in which I’m not necessarily expert. But if you call […]

23.11.2016 – 12:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Comments (0)

Morsels, a kind of poem

Latest in the “A kind of poem” series [previous: here, here, and here], I give you is “Morsels”, a kind of poem: .

02.06.2016 – 15:07 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry | Tagged | Comments (0)

Competition Anthology Published

We’ve published our 2016 Life of Words Anthology, presenting fifteen meritorious poems sent to us in our “Write a Poem about a Word” competition. It’s available here: Congratulations to all!

02.06.2016 – 08:45 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry | Comments (0)

Etymologies

Anstruther Press has recently published Etymologies, a chapbook of poems by Asa Boxer, with an introductory essay by me: See the page at Anstruther Press for more details.

18.04.2016 – 15:15 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Poetry | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Last Day to Submit a Poem for the 2016 Poetry Contest

Today is the last day for Ontario secondary school students to submit a poem to The Life of Words Poetry Competition 2016. Keep your eye on the contest page for upcoming news, and for eventual publication of The Life of Words Anthology 2016, which will print the winning entry and all honourable mentions. We’re received […]

15.04.2016 – 06:36 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Comments (0)

How did OED Supplements Supplement?

There has always been an interest in the changing editorial practice within and between various editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. Recently some scholars have complained that changing electronic interfaces are making it impossible to distinguish what edition a particular definition or quotation is coming from. See, e.g., Charlotte Brewer, “OED Online Re-launched: Distinguishing old […]

04.04.2016 – 09:58 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Life of Words Poetry Competition

Good news for Ontario secondary school students who like words: The Life of Words is announcing the first in what will be an annual poetry competition, in which we invite submissions of poems about words and reward excellence with some pretty great prizes. Here is the competition web page, where we’ll post links, news, and […]

22.03.2016 – 15:49 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Vector Space and Poetic Logic

I’ve been spending the weekend experimenting with vector space modelling and poetic language. Vector space word embedding models use learning algorithms on very large corpora in order map a unique location in n-dimensional space to each token (=word) in the corpus. “N-dimensional space” is just a mathy-sounding way of saying that multiple (or n) features […]

14.03.2016 – 10:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)