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ERIN
McKEAN
likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is the CEO of the
new online dictionary Wordnik.
She was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries
at Pearson Scott Foresman, and was recently the
editor-in-chief of the
New Oxford American
Dictionary, 2nd
edition. She has served on
the board of
the
Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its
journal, Dictionaries. She
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).
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Wordnik:
Notes from an Online Dictionary Project
Wordnik.com,
which launched in 2009, is a very large, semi-crowdsourced,
mostly-datamined dictionary of English. As we have worked to biuld the
site, create and find new lexical information, engage users and
contributors, and represent data in useful and interesting ways, we've
discovered trends in dictionary use, information consumption, language
change, and social signaling that have both surprised and encouraged us.
In addition to purely language-related discoveries, our findings
related to laypeople's conception and understanding of a what a
dictionary could or ought to be have been particularly interesting. The
metaphors of dictionary use are extremely strong for native English
speakers, and patterns of use have been much more normative than we
expected.
Issues discussed will include: copyright, parsing, graphing, related
terms, UGC and user management, search engine optimization, site
search, audio, pronunciation transcription, licensing, and UI/UX.
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