[asialex] Josà Aguirre's metalexicography
- From: "Gilles-Maurice de Schryver" <gillesmaurice.deschryver@xxxxxxxx>
- To: 'Josà Aguirre' <jaguirreuk@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2012 21:52:15 +0100
Hello Josà Aguirre,
Are we living on the same planet? Are we sharing the same discipline?
> First, as for web connectivity,
The digital revolution is not only about online dictionaries, and thus the need
to be connected to the Internet at all times.
> By a strange coincidence, richer countries tend to have better Internet access
If this is really inexplicable to you, one of us could try to explain ... any
volunteers?
> My main point is that this "paperless" "Second Revolution" in lexicography
> has to do more with money and marketing strategies than anything else.
I invite you to go back to the early days, say the Hector project dreamed up by
such giants as Sue Atkins and Patrick Hanks. Money? Marketing? No, it was ans
is all about making better dictionaries and offering new types of results in a
new environment.
> if I jot down a random Chinese character on a piece of paper for both of us
> to look up, 10 times out of 10 I will find it in a paper dictionary before
> you do in your digital dictionary.
So hereâs a nice challenge for the CJK gurus! If Jack Halpernâs tools canât
already beat you on this, let this be the Deep Blue lexicographic equivalent.
Jack!?
> clicking ...
True browse modes, mimicking the paper experience, can easily be created,
Kindle-style. (Stop thinking that ads and thus the need for clicks are the only
possible business model.)
> Higgs boson
As we know, dictionary criticism is part of metalexicography, so always
welcome! Itâs one of the ways to improve the âclassicâ contents of
dictionaries. As all practicing lexicographers will confirm: we take reviews
seriously, and if a good point is made, we improve in the next edition (paper)
or the next day (online).
> Open Dictionary
More metalexicography. My reply: Well, yes, thatâs what you get with usersâ
input. Lexicography is an art, so we shouldnât worry too much that weâll all be
out of a job too soon.
> The main constraint of a paper dictionary used to be the space available to
> each entry.
Not at all. This is the most trivial one, yes. What defined paper is the fact
that itâs all about text and figures only, no sound, no video, no way to talk
to it (well, not in a meaningful, look-up mode), no way to go from any word
straight into a corpus to see real use (as was done, a decade ago, in the
eCOBUILD with its Wordbank), no way to see Adam Kilgarriff-style wordsketches
being proffered anywhere as pop-ups, no way to see Patrick Hanks-style verb
patterns to make sense of how words are really being used (to then take you to
the meaning), etc. Think out of the box when thinking digital, not just plain
paper in electronic form, please.
> Definition of âdictionaryâ
Indeed, needs a bit of an update, isnât it!? (And the examples could be
multiplied a hundred-fold: writing in English in and about lexicography has
unfortunately suffered from a bit too much navel gazing, as any lexicographer
working on an âexoticâ language will confirm. What to do about it? Let us --
we, who are not working with and on and in English -- publish more, so that the
Anglo-Saxons will take note. Itâs not their fault, itâs ours. Do you have a
definition for âdictionaryâ from a Korean or Chinese dictionary at hand? Would
love to see those (translated, as Google Translate will make a dogâs breakfast
of it).)
> So, please, tell me, what was new in all this, where was the revolution,
> where is "the true power of the digital medium" exploited here?
Unfortunately, and typical of most metalexicography, your criticism is just
that: criticism. Your piece is short on ways to do better, solutions to the
problems you point out, answers to the questions you raise. Getting us to do
that will lead to the new dictionaries we are hoping to see. A revolution is
the starting point. Itâs not 1789 that is important, itâs what came after.
Similarly, 2013 will only be remembered as the starting point of a new type of
lexicography.
> despite all media hype and shock headline therapy, the Second Revolution in
> lexicography has not happened
I beg to differ.
All best,
Gilles-Maurice.
From: Josà Aguirre [mailto:jaguirreuk@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: woensdag 7 november 2012 14:58
To: euralex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; gillesmaurice.deschryver@xxxxxxxx; Michael Rundell
Subject: Re: [euralex] Re: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan
I'd like to reply to some of Michael Rundell's arguments in favour of the
online dictionaries.
First, as for web connectivity, Wikipedia, quoting the International
Telecommunications Union, states that in 2011 65% of the world population "Not
using the Internet" as opposed to 35% "Using the Internet".
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access]. I.e., roughly two thirds of the
world don't access the web. By a strange coincidence, richer countries tend to
have better Internet access; (we'll probably have to wait until mining
companies get wider mining rights to see the situation improve). My main point
is that this "paperless" "Second Revolution" in lexicography has to do more
with money and marketing strategies than anything else.
Secondly, digital dictionaries can be divided between "online dictionaries"
(that require Internet access) and "electronic dictionaries" (that require just
an electronic device that can run that dictionary). Commercial ads in an
electronic dictionary would quickly be labelled adware and would be frowned
upon by anyone from here to Antarctica. Commercial ads in an online
dictionary... well, what do you expect? surely someone has to pay for that!.
Yesterday I wrote in a hurry and thought this would be about suscription fees,
Michael Rundell himself pointed out that would be unlikely even if desirable.
Both types of digital dictionaries have some advantages over paper
dictionaries, but only some. And by saying this I don't advocate going back to
living in caves. Your online dictionary will be of no use when -for any number
of reasons- you are not online. Your electronic dictionary will usually get you
the information you want faster than your paper dictionary. Usually, but not
always. If you have to switch on your computer, by the time your operating
system finishes loading I will have found in a paper dictionary the entry we
were looking for. Even with your computer switched on already, if I jot down a
random Chinese character on a piece of paper for both of us to look up, 10
times out of 10 I will find it in a paper dictionary before you do in your
digital dictionary.
As for browsing, well, it might seem we use the same word, but in reality we do
not mean the same. Browsing a page on a printed dictionary can give a certain
amount of unquantifiable information, about relevance and place of an entry
word in a list of lemmas, etc. Your idea of browsing in fact means "clicking".
And this is the key to the whole "revolution". In an online dictionary you can
click everywhere. In fact, you should click anywhere. A click is a "hit". If
you want to place your ads somewhere on the internet, you want to find a
website that attracts more "hits" than others, so that more people will see
your ads. You can even have your website design geared to attracting hits. For
instance, do not provide a scrollbar with a list of lemmas. Scrolling down is
not "clicking", when you scroll down you do not hit. Make anything clickable
and you'll generate more hits, more hits will mean higher fees for more ads.
That is the "Second Revolution" in lexicography.
Let me quote from the "Stop the presses â the end of the printed dictionary"
(http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/bye-print-dictionary):
"The digital medium is the best platform for a dictionary. One of its
advantages is that we can now provide all kinds of supplementary resources â
like this blog."
Non sequitur. Like in "This is the best basket to carry apples. One of its
advantages is that we can now put into it all sorts of fruits and vegetables."
But let's have a look at the blog.
One of the jewels of that blog seems to be Kerry Maxwellâs weekly Buzzwords
column, which "has been keeping us up-to-date with changes in the language for
almost ten years.". Well, it seems to amount to one post per week, each devoted
to one word. From the list, I chose just one recent entry, "Higgs boson", where
it is defined as:
"noun [countable]
in physics, a particle (= an extremely small piece of matter that is part of an
atom) that could explain where mass (= the amount of matter that something
contains) comes from."
Then, one single quotation from CNN dated 5th July 2012:
'It's like molasses! But sort of like the air! Yet it also behaves like fans of
Justin Bieber! Everyone's talking about the Higgs boson, even though there's no
really great metaphor for describing what it is and how it works. We know that
this particle is responsible for the fact that matter - i.e. the stuff we are
made of - has mass.'
Using a printed copy of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, vol. 2,
I could, at a glance, find a quotation for "Higgs boson" dated 1974. Of course
the CNN quotations is much more fun (it even manages to mention Justin Bieber
and Higgs on the same paragraph) and cooler than the ones that have been
appearing in Physics literature for the past 40 years. No mention of who Higgs
may be or what a boson might be. Seriously, is this all you could come up with?
Is this keeping us up-to-date with changes in the language? I can't help but
think of what John Algeo and his colleagues from "Among the New Words" could
have done had they had the digital resources that you seem to have at your
disposal.
The final pearl of the blog is the Open Dictionary where users can send their
own entries. You wrote: "Thirty years ago, the arrival of corpus data sparked a
revolution in the way of dictionaries are created.". It must have been a pretty
short-lived revolution when you need user-made examples like this one to
illustrate the use of "graph" as a verb: "This site has graphs that graph
what's what."
Sorry, but the one thing the Internet could do without is one more blog on
language issues full of trendy words but no real substance.
You wrote: "Finally getting rid of the paper constraints, and starting to
exploit the true power of the digital medium -- and to be able to do just that
-- is nothing less than a revolution."
The main constraint of a paper dictionary used to be the space available to
each entry. Now, the online dictionary reproduces verbatim the whole entry for
the word"dictionary" exactly as it was printed in my 2002 paper copy of
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. When I showed this
definition ("a book that gives a list of words in alphabetical order and
explains what they mean") to some of my students, those from European countries
had nothing to comment, while my Korean and Chinese students were scratching
their heads trying to reconcile that with their own dictionaries. Koreans,
after some interesting discussion, agreed that they could accept it provided
they were allowed to stretch the meaning of "alphabetical" quite a bit. In
Chinese lexicographic tradition based on Kangxi radicals this definition just
would not work, words are not arranged in alphabetical order and yet they are
dictionaries. Michael Rundell mentioned that it was this kind of young
"cohort", or "market segment" that they were trying to reach. Well, if you
intend to wean them off their Naver and Daum bilingual dictionaries, you'll
have to do much better than that. When I wrote yesterday about "recycling old
stuff over and over again to diversify their products", I meant exactly this: a
2002 definition lifted from a printed dictionary is "released of all its paper
constraints" and placed verbatim on an online dictionary. The remaining
differences between the online version and the paper one are: there is a
clickable button to hear the pronunciation (remember, 1 click = 1 hit) -but
this has been around in electronic dictionaries for the past 20 years-; also
you can click on a number of words to go to their definitions (1 click = 1
hit). You can also click on a thesaurus entry for every sense of the word that
will show a list of 10 items (of course you can click on the "more" button to
see more, but you won't get any sense discrimination between related words,
just a list of words with their definitions... ). Bear in mind, while you do
all this clicking, that the page is almost empty of any useful information, all
that space could have been designed to accomodate a better "user experience"
without any clutter at all, but that wouldn't generate clicks (remember, no
clicks, no hits). So, please, tell me, what was new in all this, where was the
revolution, where is "the true power of the digital medium" exploited here?
I wish Macmillan all the best in whatever business model they choose, but let's
be clear about this, despite all media hype and shock headline therapy, the
Second Revolution in lexicography has not happened.
Best wishes
Josà Aguirre
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