Johnson's Dictionary Online – News and Progress

July 29, 2022

Word-lovers: Please join us!

You can expand your vocabulary, get an inside look at this major digital humanities project, and learn more about the history of the English language. What’s more, you can earn volunteer credits for high school graduation and enhance your applications for scholarships, college or graduate school. Work remotely Work at your own pace We’ll teach you what you need to...

Dictionary

July 10, 2022

Fixing tangled xml:ids

Usually when people hear about the Johnson’s Dictionary Online project, they assume that our work involves: Getting a computer to turn page images into text via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Fixing typos That’s it. In reality, this project involves innumerable tasks that most people would never think about. Some of these tasks are more interesting than others. This post is...

Backstage/Dictionary/XML

July 6, 2022

“Word-level image coming soon”

Seeing an image alongside each transcribed dictionary is important. Many of the features of 18th century print can’t be reproduced in Unicode. And our goal is to make Johnson’s dictionary as easy to access as a modern dictionary, which means that even if we could reproduce the print exactly, we wouldn’t want to do it. The dictionary’s 18th-century print conventions,...

Backstage/Dictionary/Images

July 3, 2022

Creating images during a pandemic

As I mentioned in a previous post, we began the project with scans generously provided by the Cordell Collection at Indiana State University, with student volunteers at UCF cropping full-page images into entry-sized images. Then a team of UCF computer science majors created software that could de-warp, enhance, crop, and merge entry images—when we supplied it with high resolution images....

Backstage/Dictionary/Images

June 29, 2022

Automating the image creation

Our legacy site provided full-page black & white images, along with smaller images of those entries that had been transcribed. For our new site, we planned some key improvements: full-page images scanned in color from an original copy (vs. a modern facsimile copy) entry images appear alongside the transcription (vs. on a separate page) images for both the 1755 (1st...

Backstage/Dictionary/Images

June 26, 2022

Where do the images come from?

Johnson’s Dictionary Online has benefited from the generous help of two libraries: The Warren N. and Suzanne B. Cordell Collection of Dictionaries at the Indiana State University Library, and the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The full-page images on our site come from UF: 1755 (1st folio) edition: ESTC T117231, UF shelfmark 423.2 J69d 1755, folio...

Backstage/Dictionary/Images

May 25, 2022

Johnson’s Dictionary is about more than looking up words

by Bernard King Before I begin on my reflection of this project, I want to discuss the original writer/researcher of Johnson’s Dictionary, Samuel Johnson himself. Born in Lichfield, England in 1709, Johnson experienced physical and mental health issues since he was an infant. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis at an early age. He also had to content with mental health...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences

May 18, 2022

Johnson is a man of necessary words

by Kianna Solano Kianna Solano, a History major at the University of Central Florida, wrote this reflection for an independent study course during the Fall 2021 semester. Samuel Johnson is an ambitious man if I’ve ever heard of one. In fact, I wouldcall him tempestuous as well, a word that he would define with a short definition andabout a million...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences

May 11, 2022

I’ll never forget the word “butyraceous”

by Janelle Guichard Janelle Guichard, a History major at the University of Central Florida, wrote this reflection after working as a volunteer during the Fall 2021 semester. When I began my first semester of majoring in History at University of Central Florida, I was hoping there would be an opportunity to become involved in an internship or project through the...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences

May 4, 2022

Proofreading was especially rewarding

by Shannon Ganeshram Shannon Ganeshram, an English major at the University of Central Florida, wrote this reflection for an internship during the Fall 2021 semester. Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary almost completely by himself, a feat for his day and age. He was a prolific English writer with many works under his belt, but through his dictionary, he manages to...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences