Welcome to the Relational Lexicography Knowledgebase
This in-progress Knowledgebase hosts a catalog of North American Indigenous language dictionaries alongside information on technologies and digital tools for lexicography. Our goal for this resource is that it be used to assist those engaged in community-based dictionary projects by offering a place to review earlier lexicographical work and to learn about some current technologies that can be used to support dictionary projects. Both the ‘Dictionaries’ and the ‘Technologies’ pages are filterable, making information easier to locate.
The Dictionaries section of the Knowledgebase offers a catalogue of North American Indigenous language dictionaries, hosted together in one place. The database includes information on over 700 dictionaries and wordlists of North American Indigenous languages, and spans print dictionaries, ebooks, online dictionaries, interactive websites and apps for mobile devices.
This section of our Knowledgeable is designed to serve as a reference showcasing the many different kinds of dictionaries that exist and the diversity of lexicographical products over time. We hope that this database will assist communities working on their own dictionaries learn about related projects and earlier work.
We reviewed each dictionary for information on authorship, how and if speakers were cited, when the resource was published, and whether the dictionary is openly accessible or only accessible through libraries or institutions. Entries can be filtered by language, language family, publication year (organized by decade), province(s)/state(s) in which the language is spoken, access conditions, and dictionary type (monolingual, bilingual, etc.).
Our database currently includes dictionaries of North American Indigenous languages published after 1950. In the future, we plan to add more information on resources that were unavailable at the time of our initial scoping exercise, such as dictionaries that are only available in print or ones that are accessible through our university library. We also wish to expand the regional search feature beyond provincial and state borders, and explore include a map interface.
Based on responses to our survey, and working from our own experiences with technologies for dictionary creation, we have also compiled a Knowledgebase of technologies and digital tools commonly used for lexicography. We designed this resource to assist those engaged in community-based dictionary projects to identify technologies best suited to their goals and work.
The Knowledgebase has posts on 16 technologies. For each technology, we provide a summary, some information on how it can and has been used, screenshots of the interface when available, highlights and considerations, any reviews or guides that we have located, and relevant information on access, flexibility and data management (such as import, export, and compatibility with other software and operating systems).
