Johnson's Dictionary Online – Page 2

June 1, 2023

Samuel Johnson and The Work That Must Be Protected in History

by Tanner Slinkard Throughout LIN 4660, I and several other students were tasked to archive a classic dictionary – the 1773 edition – made by Samuel Johnson and headed by Dr. Beth Young. The project itself was so far a success and was intriguing for me and many others who partook in this endeavor. However, the work in question, although...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences

May 31, 2023

The Founding Father of the Collective English Lexicon

by Danae Stafford This is my second semester working on this project and my second reflection post. My first semester with the dictionary was very fulfilling, and I knew I wanted to keep up with it beyond those first sixteen weeks. I was very grateful to be able to return to the project, not only because I needed the credits...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences

May 24, 2023

No king rules forever and no dictionary is everlasting

by Iván Ramírez Sánchez In the following lines I will try to give some justification for such a grandiloquent title, but it does reflect a reality that we tend to overlook, especially before delving into lexicography. Samuel Johnson was a brilliant mind who possessed what has been said of some Spanish lexicographers: “ardor intellectual” (intellectual ardor), which means that they...

Backstage/Dictionary/Experiences

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