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Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
Norsk Ordbok is a 12 volume academic dictionary covering Norwegian Nynorsk literature and all Norwegian dialects from 1600 to the present. The dictionary is to be completed in 2014, the year of the bicentenary of the Norwegian constitution. The collection of data started in 1930 and the editing of the dictionary started in 1946. In the 1990s the Norwegian language collections were digitized, and from 2002 onwards Norsk Ordbok has been edited on a digital platform which communicates with a system of relational databases for manuscript storage. These databases include digitized slip archives, a draft manuscript from 1940, glossaries from the period between 1600 and 1850, canonical dictionaries from the period 1870-1910, bibliography, local dictionaries, text corpus (90 mill. words) etc. The source material is linked together in a Meta dictionary (MD). The MD is an electronic index with headwords in standard spelling, and it represents the hub of the language collections, where the source material from the databases is linked to headword nodes. This MD in turn communicates with the editing system and the dictionary database. The electronic linking up of the source material with the dictionary entries secures that the interpretation of data and product of scientific research can be reproducible in a very easy way. This is important to a scholarly dictionary. Further, the MD index system enables us to set a relative dimension for each dictionary entry and to make a master plan for setting alphabet dimensions for the whole dictionary. This is important to all modern dictionary projects with limited resources. The digitized source material, the digital editing platform and the digital dictionary product also point forward to new ways of presenting the data, and they point forward to future lexicographical research. The paper will present the digital resources of the Norsk Ordbok 2014 project, developed in close cooperation with the scientific programmers at the Unit of Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo. It will focus on the Norsk Ordbok 2014 experience with working on a fully digitized editing platform for the last 10 years, and it will also comment briefly on how the developed tools and resources point forward into Norwegian lexicography in the future.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB) is one of the big national dictionary projects started in the 19th century. SAOB is still in production – there are another two volumes out of 38 to printed before 2018. The structure inside the volumes is (of course) varied/varying. There are ten chief editors and five generations of editors involved in the project. In the 1980s the SAOB was OCR-scanned. The result was used for a webversion in the internet from 1997. The webversion is very frequently used but has a lot of shortcomings due to, among other things, a great typographic complexity and a scanning technology of the time. Now the editorial board is discussing the future: redigitalization (in China), updating of the webversion with new search tools, updating of the dictionary itself and some form of editing tool.