This news just released: The Life of Words is getting a major boost, in the form of a $150,00 grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, UWaterloo, and St Jerome’s University, to fund my research on poetry and the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Early Researcher Award provides $100,000 in funding from the Ministry (plus $40,000 to my host universities in reimbursements for indirect costs) and $25,000 apiece from UW and St Jerome’s. All the money goes to building up a research team, student training, and outreach to schools.
This is a fantastic development for The Life of Words. Over the next few years it should allow us to complete a first full tagging of Oxford English Dictionary evidence quotations for a limited number of genres (including poetry and verse drama), and develop a number of techniques for analyzing in a systematic way the interchanges between lexicography and English poetry. The plan right now sees a cohort of undergraduate RAs, a Master’s student, and a postdoc later on.
As part of the grant we will also be hosting a UWaterloo St Jerome’s Life of Words competition, open to secondary school students in Ontario. Details to follow.
For more on what I’ve been doing with the OED, see the tag archive on this site and on its predecessor, poetry-contingency.uwaterloo.ca.
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