Project news

Pasadena

By the mid 1990s the need for a new computer system for the OED was becoming apparent to its editors. The old system, a hybrid of software developed for OED, for other Oxford dictionaries, and for corpus analysis, was becoming increasingly elderly and unstable. Indeed by the time it was finally switched off to make way for the new system it was over twelve years old, old enough to be drawing its pension in computing terms. In 2002 the process of developing a new system was initiated when the former Director, Penny Silva, appointed Laura Elliott as OED Development Manager with this remit. A long process of planning, designing, and development began.

In June this year the OED launched its new electronic editing system, Pasadena (or more fully, the optimistically named Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application). The launch marked the conclusion of a very successful project with input from every member of the department at the different stages of consultation, design, development, testing, and training. In particular the success of the project owed much to the close and happy collaboration between the Pasadena project team, led by Laura Elliott, Michael Proffitt, and Tom Gilmore, and the team of French software developers from IDM, led by Alban Fonrouge, Philippe Climent, and Marc Ariberti, which resulted in not only a wonderful new system but also a whole new vocabulary of Franglais for the OED. Thanks to the efforts of all involved, the go-live period went very smoothly. In the period since Chief Editor John Simpson made the first ceremonial edits in the entry for the noun panache, almost three thousand entries have been edited in Pasadena, and the first batch of entries has been extracted for publication.

The Pasadena project involved not only the creation of a new computer system, but also the conversion of the entire electronic text of the OED (containing approximately a quarter of a million entries) and the huge 'Incomings' database from the Dictionary's reading programmes (containing two million quotations), into XML, a more standardized and adaptable form of encoding than was previously used. It was a process that could be likened to trying to create a single picture from several different one-thousand-piece jigsaws; but it enabled the creation of many new features which facilitate the editorial process and allow editors to concentrate on lexicography rather than formatting and other technical aspects of presentation. In the new entry-editing software, previously time-consuming tasks such as ordering quotations within senses, renumbering senses, and creating cross-references, can now be done either automatically or at the click of a button.

The new bibliographical system means that information arising from the work of the OED's bibliographical editors can be stored electronically rather than on slips, and is accessible to OED editors by a series of links, leading from the entry they are editing to the bibliographical record. The linking of quotations from the same source to a single, central citation means that implementing a new bibliographic style (such as the expansion of Haml. to Hamlet) can be carried out by making one change rather than one thousand.

Requests for external research can be launched directly from the entry an editor is working in, and their progress can be monitored via the Search Interface. Electronic prompts can be sent automatically to consultants, who can view the very latest state of the entry on which they are being consulted via a web browser; and editors are notified by automatic emails when research has been completed and the results are awaiting them in their entry.

Finally, the ability to access the OED database remotely means that for the first time OED editors in New York can edit entries in exactly the same way as their counterparts in Oxford.

With the launch of Pasadena, the OED editors are now well equipped to speed up the revision and updating of the Dictionary for publication online.

Balderdash and Piffle

There have been lights and cameras in the OED Department recently: the London production company, Takeaway Media, has been filming for the forthcoming BBC2 series on words called 'Balderdash and Piffle'. This series, made in collaboration with the OED, is to be broadcast in January and February 2006. Each of the six programmes will be based upon one letter of the alphabet, and will explore evidence gathered by the public—evidence resulting from the 'Wordhunt' launched by the BBC in June, in which the OED asked for help with fifty words. Each programme will also include a short film on an aspect of OED work. See www.oed.com/bbcwordhunt or www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/wordhunt for more—including a list of the fifty words.