DEMOCRATIZING DIGITAL LEXICOGRAPHY

The NEH-funded project “Democratizing Digital Lexicography'' is directed by Dr. Ligeia Lugli (Mangalam Center,  USA) and coordinated by Prof. Regiani Zacarias (UNESP, Brazil). It aims at facilitating the creation and dissemination of digital dictionaries for low-resource languages. With many world languages at risk of extinction, online dictionaries & glossaries are increasingly crucial. Unfortunately, the languages most in need of such resources have the biggest challenges. The availability of digital infrastructure for a language is proportional to its representation - the more data that is available in digital format, the easier it becomes to automatically process it. Conversely, the less a language/culture is represented online, the higher the costs of retrieving and processing data about it. In this project we will prototype a digital infrastructure that can help redress this inequality by drastically reducing the costs and technical expertise required to create, publish and maintain online dictionaries. A series of iterative development cycles will bring together user-testers, identify their needs, and prepare an alpha-prototype application to address these needs.