Long-distance Lexicography: A View from the Field

Long-distance Lexicography: A View from the Field i; Orin Hargraves "t is a commonplace these days to remark on the ways in which .the revolution in information technology has changed the ways that people get things done. John Simpson of the Oxford English Dictionary, addressing the 2001 DSNA conference in Ann Arbor, illustrated some of the many ways in which the Internet, and easily distributable texts on magnetic media, have revolutionized the practice of lexicography (Simpson [2002]). Today we all take for granted an important implication of these changes that was not especially pertinent to Mr. Simpson's remarks, but that figures importantly in the subject of this paper: access to English texts of every variety is no longer bound by ownership or location. Texts of every kind, including corpora stored on the Internet or on magnetic media, are now readily accessible and searchable by anyone who owns a computer — which today for all practical purposes means everyone. There has been a gradual migration from the publisher outwards of the important resources that go into making dictionaries. Everything that was once necessarily located in-house can now be decentralized and can reside anywhere, whether it be digital or human. What all this means is that nobody has to be in the office to do the work. Anyone with the requisite skills and equipment can practice what I will call long-distance lexicography: that is, practical lexicography remote from the premises of a dictionary publisher. The motive for any technological change in lexicography has generally and rightly been to improve the final product; that is, the Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 25 (2004) 138Orin Hargraves dictionary. One of the greatest of recent changes in the practice of lexicography is its portability, which I havejust outlined. All technological innovations that have aided lexicography have brought with them by necessity a new way of working, but in many cases a change in working methods has been regarded as a by-product of technological change, rather than the purpose of it. As a result, we have perhaps let lexicography slip out of the office without anyone noticing that it was gone. I will turn now to the recent historical development of this phenomenon. The starting point of the process that has led to the possibility of long-distance lexicography was the computerization of dictionary databases by publishers in-house. This initial computerization of databases , from the 1960s onwards, was responsible for gradually moving the lexicographer's main focus from the page to the screen, but it also made it possible to print out and distribute various batches of work or views into the database for editors to work on somewhere other than sitting at a screen, and somewhere other than in the publisher's office, without compromising the integrity of the database. The need to take lexicography out of the office was not specifically related to the development of the technology that made it easy to do so. As far as I can determine, the practice of using multiple contract lexicographers in a systematic way started in the UK and was driven by two considerations: first, there was the need for more lexicographers on particular projects than publishers wanted to provide permanent desks for; second, there existed in the UK a pool of experienced lexicographers who had formerly worked full-time for one publisher or another and then decided to work independently. It was not until the early 1990s, however, that publishers, again in the UK, first began recruiting novice lexicographers, including Americans, for projects that were not expected to lead to full-time employment. This practice of recruiting and training aspiring lexicographers on a contract basis continued and expanded throughout the 1990s. The result is that today there is a corps of independent lexicographers, made up of those who have always been contractors, and those who were at one time full-time employees of a dictionary publisher. While the number of lexicographers who worked remotely for publishers increased steadily throughout the 1990s, the way in which they worked changed considerably over this period. For our purposes it is convenient to divide this evolution of long-distance lexicography into three phases...