Scientific Colloquium
October 7, 2011
"How to Make a
Massively Multiplayer Dictionary"
Dictionaries have long been
team efforts (even supposedly lone wolf
lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson employed a staff) -- but
on the
order of dozens or scores of people, not thousands and millions.
Our
friend the Internet (thanks DARPA!) has made it possible to take
advantage of the expertise (or even merely the opinions) of
those
thousands and millions, often in ways which require little to no
explicit participation. Is this worth doing? What does it mean
for the
"authority" of a dictionary created in this way? And how do we
get all
those folks to "play nice"?
Biographical Information
Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She
is the founder of Wordnik.com. She was the editor in chief of
the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e, and is the author of
Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words,
Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore (also about
words). Her first novel, The Secret Lives of Dresses, was
published by GrandCentral/5Spot in February 2011. She recently
moved from Chicago to the Bay Area, rants about dresses on her
blog (A Dress A Day), and she's actually really bad at Scrabble
(but surprisingly good at roller-skating).