The History of Greek Lexicography has many examples of exceptional and quite “crazy” pioneer researchers, amateur lexicographers, linguist authors who travel all the country to collect data for their lexica and dictionaries. Nikos Kazantzakis travelled most areas of Greece to collect “beautiful” words for his works, especially for his epic saga, Odyssey – as a sequel of the Homer’s Odyssey. He describes the following story.

Kazantzakis was taking pictures of rare flowers and trees in the countryside of Crete. On the outskirts of a village he was stunned by a beautiful flower. He asked the children that were playing nearby what the name of the flower was. They did not know the name; however, they informed him that only one, a very old lady of the village, would know the name of the flower. Kazantzakis went to the house of that lady to ask her about that name. Unfortunately, the neighbors informed him that she had just passed away. Kazantzakis became sad and he then said: “Our language lost a glorious member, since a word just died with that lady…”. Continue reading From a Legacy Dictionary to New Lexica: An Alternative Time-Machine to Discover Neologisms

Dutch historical language has been described in four separate comprehensive dictionaries: the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT, Dictionary of the Dutch Language, 1500-1976) the Middelnederlandsch Woordenboek (MNW, Dictionary of Middle Dutch, ~1250 – 1550), the Vroegmiddelnederlands Woordenboek (VMNW, Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch, 1200-1300). and the Oudnederlands Woordenboek (‘ONW’, Dictionary of Old Dutch, ca. 500–1200). Both WNT and MNW were paper dictionaries, that were digitised by keying and made available on CD-ROM. ONW and VMNW were born digitial dictionaries. To have a comprehensive view of the Dutch language, it was decided to put the four dictionaries online in one portal. Making it possible for users to query one ore more dictionaries simultaneously was a logical step to take because these dictionaries complement each other. The challenge was not only to give the user optimal access to the dictionary information, but also to do so without compromising the uniqueness of each individual dictionary. Continue reading Digitised and Born-Digital in One Application: Dutch Historical Dictionaries Online

I was a PhD student just finishing my thesis when my doctoral studies advisor, Professor Viktor Kabakchi, a grey-haired Russian scholar with many years of university teaching experience, invited me to take part in updating his brainchild  – The Dictionary of Russia. The first print edition of this dictionary about Russian cultural terms in English, which was published more than 10 years ago, required a thorough editorial revision. My excitement to meet new challenges as well as new perspectives in life knew no bounds.

However, at the time I didn’t have the slightest idea what to start with in order to digitize a print dictionary and produce its electronic version. To my great joy, the eLex 2013 Conference in Tallinn, organized by the Institute of Estonian Language and the Trojina Institute of Applied Slovene Studies shed some light on my understanding of what e-lexicography is. But that was only a mere introduction to the field.

Soon afterwards, I was lucky to start discussing the digitization of The Dictionary of Russia with K Dictionaries from Tel Aviv, who agreed to run the project and provide all the necessary technical support and guidance. I wrote this post to share with you some personal notes on a retro-digitization project taken by someone who is not a computer geek.  So please do not expect find too much ‘technical stuff’ in it, as my idea was to give an overview of the main milestones and show where we have come by now. Continue reading A New Life for an Old Dictionary: Notes on Digitizing the Dictionary of Russia

One way to digitise a dictionary is using Optical Character Recognition or OCR. But is OCR feasible at all for my dictionary? And if so, which OCR program should I used, trainable or omnifont? And how about the workflow: should I train the OCR engine or not? And, finally, what should be the output format of my OCR? For those wanting to take the OCR adventure, here a very brief introduction.

To OCR or not to OCR

Some texts are totally  un-ocr-able:

Continue reading How Can I OCR My Dictionary?