Editorial Issues

An online lexicon and a paper lexicon which have the same content are not merely different expressions of the same thing. The difference in media has implications beyond the issues of macrostructure, microstructure, and interstructure which I have already discussed; the change in media alters basic details of how the content of the lexicon is produced and managed. This section discusses how this can affect the process of editing a lexicon.

Ease and Speed of Maintenance

Online lexicons differ from electronic lexicons generally (e.g., CDROM-based lexicons), in that online lexicons can be changed instantly and easily, at the will of the lexicographer, and that these changes take effect instantly for all users. This follows from our definition of online lexicon as one where the lexicon resource is being served from the lexicographer's computer. Dodd sees the benefits of this from a point of view of being able to include neologisms:
In the first place, the paper dictionary is inevitably static, reflecting a state of linguistic affairs that is at best a snapshot of the period immediately preceding its publication. [...] A dictionary held in dynamic form in a computer database can far more readily be kept abreast of current language, because alterations can be made very simply to any database, with the result that there is no need to wait for accumulated corrections, additions and other changes to be sufficient to justify a new edition raher than a simple reprinting. The cost of changing an entry in a database is also lower than that of printed adjustments. [Dodd 1989:87]
Dodd sees online lexicons as the way to easily keep the lexicon up to date with neologisms, and this is very important to, say, the Free Online Dictionary of Computing (Howe 1994), which, by being online and being instantly updatable at zero cost, avoids the basic problem faced by books about computers, namely that they are obsolete before they can even come back from the printer.

Besides easily accomodating change in the language, online lexicons allow for easy correction of errors. This is significant in light of Landau's instructions on dealing with errors in print dictionaries:

[...] the first edition of any dictionary contains numerous errors. Some of these errors will have been detected in the page proof stage [an agonizing process which Landau describes in pages 263-264 --SB], but unless they are very serious[,] corrections must not be made in pages. The expense is prohibitive, and provoking delays in production makes no sense. [...] [N]otations [...] should be made in a card file, called a correction file, to be implemented at the earliest practicable time in a subsequent revision. Every dictionary should have its ongoing correction file, where no error is too trivial to be noted. [Landau 1984:267]
This was all that could be done in a production model which was based on discrete printings which had to happen by certain deadlines. However, with online lexicons, as with any online resource, changes can be made instantly. The rule for dealing with errors then becomes "if you see an error, fix it now, before more anyone else sees it", where "fixing it" means changing the master copy of the lexicon which all the users are accessing.

The Expectation of Maintenance

With the ability to easily and quickly add or revise entries in an online lexicon comes an expectation to do so. Users of online resources are not naïve as to the broader details of their production; users quickly learn that, as a rule with very few exceptions, online resources are easily updatable. With this in mind, users will come to expect that online lexicons of living languages will incorporate new words and senses, as they come into usage.

FOLDOC, The Free Online Dictionary of Computing (Howe 1994), contains a clever mechanism which is useful for ascertaining where there are gaps in the lexicon: every time a user searches for a term which is not found in the lexicon, a log entry is made noting this failed search. A log analysis program periodically generates a report listing the most common unsuccessful searches. By routinely checking this report, the FOLDOC editors can discover what new words users want to find definitions for. In the case of FOLDOC, these terms are new items of jargon -- for example, the names of new file formats or new kinds of computer chips.

This method of logging unsuccessful user queries is secondary to the main way that new entries are written for FOLDOC: a user emails the editors complaining that a term could not be found, and either requesting a meaning, or making a guess at the meaning they were hoping to see an elaboration of.

Beyond knowing that online media can be easily and quickly changed, users know that the maintainers of online content can be contacted thru electronic mail. They expect online lexicons to be kept up to date and they expect that errors reported to the lexicographers thru electronic mail will be fixed in a timely manner.

Editing for Small Speech Communities

In the case of general-use dictionaries of national languages, the basic day-to-day process of editing online lexicons need not vary greatly from the process of editing paper lexicons. If anything, because of the the ease of maintenance discussed above, editing online general-use dictionaries of national languages is a mere simplification of the process of editing for print. In contrast, the editing process may change greatly in the case of online lexicons whose scope is technical jargons shared by small groups of professionals, or of lexicons which are of "small" languages, specifically Native languages where lexicography (and probably even functional literacy, considering McLaughlin 1992) is relatively new.

While the circumstances of, say, a nematologist and of a speaker of Western Apache, may vary greatly in the conditions of use of their respective language forms and the sociolinguistic and socioeconomic implications, they do share one factor of extreme relevance to lexicographic production: they are members of small speech communities.

The market for general English dictionaries is large enough to support several large dictionary houses in the US alone, each constantly producing varied revisions and editions of their print lexicons, with the per-unit cost kept low by virtue of the economy of scale resulting from the printing and distribution of millions of dictionaries a year. Small speech communities, however, cannot financially support a comparable production cycle of constantly recompiling and re-editing print lexicons, and this leads to a serious financial quandary: if the editors opt for a large press run (in an effort to bring down per-unit cost), they end up with a quantity of volumes it may well take them a decade to sell off. And if, four years into that decade, the editors decide that the corrections and additions that have since accumulated are sufficient to warrant a new edition, they are faced with having to take a loss on (whether by remaindering or destroying) the six years' worth of unsold copies of the current edition. Conversely, if the press run is small, the run will sell out much quicker, allowing for frequent revisions, but the per-unit cost will necessarily be much higher.

The result of these issues of finance is that small speech communities are generally ill-served by print lexicons. One either pays moderately for a lexicon which may not have been re-edited in ten years -- and may not be re-edited for another ten still; or one pays dearly for a lexicon that is revised every two or three years; or one may simply have to do without.

The ease (and in financial terms, the low cost) of revision in online lexicons vastly increases their usefulness to small speech communities.

Editing for Lexicons of Specialist Jargons

In the case of specialist jargons, the editing of online lexicons may simply develop as a straightforward elaboration of the tasks currently associated with the editing of print lexicons of those specialist jargons; but the editing process may also come to involve input from bibliographers and other maintainers of existing online resources which are relevant to the specialty in question, but which are not lexicons.

The transition from being a bibliographer of a specialist field of knowledge to editing an online lexicon of that jargon of the field may not seem an obvious development. However, since the late 1980s, frequently updated electronic bibliographies of specialist fields of knowledge (whether accessible on CDROM or through online databases) have largely replaced print bibliographies. This means that specialist bibliographers are now already familiar with the tasks of maintaining keyword-searchable electronic databases whose value to their respective fields depends on them being up-to-date; they are also familiar with the evolving jargon of the field.

While I anticipate that bibliographic references in online lexicons (as discussed above, in the section "Interstructure") will generally come after the definitional content and will be secondary in importance to it, I believe that that new specialist lexicons could, in some cases, be developed as mere adjuncts to existing bibliographic databases. In fact, there have already been cases of the preliminary development of such online lexicons as subsystems of larger online information systems called "community systems":

Electronic community systems [...] encode a research community's information and knowledge and provide an online environment to support the manipulation of that knowledge [...] An electronic community system helps researchers in the community function more efficiently and effectively by allowing them to browse the available knowledge easily, record their own knowledge for others to use, and form interrelationships between concepts. [Chen, Yim, Fye, and Schatz 1995:175]
Chen, Yim, Fye, and Schatz, speaking from experience gained in developing community systems for groups of biologists, assert the need to develop and (crucially) maintain online lexicons of the jargon of a community system's specialist audience, as part of community system engineering:
According to Frenkel [1991, describing an experimental community system for the Human Genome Project --SB], the meanings of concepts "become better understood as more knowledge is accumulated and integrated." This novel characteristic of changing definitions over time must be implemented into the community system to make the system more flexible. Research that deals with an "old" concept must still be accessible by the users even though the terminology is no longer in common use. [Chen, Yim, Fye, and Schatz 1995:177]
As community systems are still an emerging technolgy, it remains to be seen whether the content of existing paper lexicons will be adapted to serve as the lexicon for community systems; or whether the content for community system lexicons may be developed anew. It is also an open question whether long-term maintenance of online specialist jargon lexicons (whether part of community systems or not) will be done by people who are primarily lexicographers or primarily electronic bibliographers, or by mixtures of both groups.

Editing for Lexicons of Native Languages

Current editorial practice in the production of lexicons of Native languages involves regrettably little re-editing; the financial contraints discussed above are all the more severe for the production of Native lexicons. And so there is typically only one edition of a given Native lexicon, leaving no opportunity for corrections in later editions. This is especially unfortunate, as the first edition of a Native lexicon is bound to contain many more errors and shortcomings than the first edition of a lexicon of a specialist jargon, because languages are, of course, more complex than jargons; because of a relative lack of lexicographic tradition for Native languages; because the main lexicographer of a typical Native dictionary is likely to not be a native speaker of the language; and sometimes because of uneven coverage of the various dialects and registers of the Native language in question. With online lexicons of Native languages even more than with online lexicons of specialist jargons, there is the opportunity to greatly amend such shortcomings.

The best way to find and fix errors in Native lexicons is to have input from the Natives themselves who are speakers, teachers, or learners of the language, hopefully while they are routinely using the dictionary. But such input is very difficult to get if the lexicographers do not permanently live among the Native community where the language is spoken, as is the case more often than not.

However, with online media, it becomes easy to arrange for a group of Native speakers to have access to electronic mail. An email list (also called "a listserv", or "an email reflector") can be formed so that the Native speakers and the non-Native lexicographers can, as group, discuss adding and improving entries, can consider possible improvements to the design of the online lexicon, and can also provide perspectives on the role that the Native community expects the online lexicon to play in the larger task of teaching the Native language and culture.

There are, of course, difficulties: access to the Internet, while easy to get in larger cities and towns, is typically harder to get on reservations and in other rural Native population centers. Moreover, it is my experience that ownership of computers, and skill at using them, is not as common among Natives as among the general populace. However, I have seen both these situations improve immensely just within the past few years, and I believe that in the next few years, these will be only minor problems; Internet access will be as easy to get as phone service, and computers for basic Internet access will get cheaper and simpler to use. Moreover, Native consultants to online lexicon projects are likely to be involved with tribal efforts at language preservation, probably as teachers, and will thereby have access to computers and Internet access at local schools.

It is my experience that interested Native speakers with Internet access may not have the time to invest in being a full editor of a dictionary of their language; or they may lack the metalinguistic or technical skill this would require. But many of them will still be interested in answering queries about word meaning and participating in discussions about design of the lexicon, in the setting of an email list. Many Native speakers understand the crucial role that development of lexicons play for language preservation, and will often gladly welcome the opportunity to influence the design and content of lexicons of their language.

Minimally, an email list of such interested Native speakers can serve as pool of informants from whom the lexicographer can seek information on unfamiliar words. But in its highest realization, such a list can function as the official board of editors of the online lexicon. In spite of technical obstacles, it is well worth the bother to assemble such a group; it is my experience that involving informed Natives as much as possible in the production of online lexicons of their languages makes the resulting works much more linguistically accurate, more sociolinguistically relevant to the Native community, and better suited to language pedagogy. Moreover, having active Native consultants or editors means that an online lexicon is more likely to be seen not as a mere academician's computerized toy, but instead as an evolving interactive tool for representing the community's language, crucially guided by members of the community itself.


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