Category Archives: Lexicography

Guest Post: Don’t go breaking (up) my genre: visualizing genre against attributes

Danielle Griffin is a research assistant on her third co-op term at The Life of Words. This is the first of a few posts based on her last work-term report,”Comparative Data Visualizations of Textual Features in the OED and the Life of Words Genre 3.0 Tagging System”. Danielle’s report won the Quarry Integrated Communication Co-op […]

25.05.2017 – 15:18 | By DBG | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

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)

Guest Post: Cataloguing the Catalogue

Cosmin Dszurdsza is a research assistant at The Life of Words. In my last guest post I discussed problematic magazine classifications. Now, once again, a periodical publication proves to be an exciting and difficult genre identification challenge. The kind of text I will be dealing with today is the “catalogue” (filtered out of our data […]

02.05.2017 – 09:24 | By VCD | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

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)

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)

Guest Post: Magazines and the Dentist Test

Cosmin Dzsurdzsa is a research assistant working on identifying the textual genre of quotations in the OED. Here he writes the first in a series of posts on borderline and difficult genre determinations. Filtering quotation blocks is essential to optimizing our results with the quantity of data we deal with here at LOW. For a […]

03.02.2017 – 15:03 | By VCD | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

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)