Oxford Dictionary Does Science Fiction

Embedded Geek writes: "The News Log for Locus has an item about the Oxford English Dictionary's attempt to capture unique words and phrases used in various fields. It has begun with a pilot site for science fiction. Specifically, they are looking for published uses of specific words in Science Fiction, SF Criticism, and SF Fandom. The goal is not to create a glossary of terms but rather find the earliest (antedating), latest (postdating), and intermediate (interdating) uses of these words already in the dictionary in books, magazines, etc. They are soliciting help from the public in this effort. Presumably, if this effort is a success, they will begin working on other fields: other literature, programming, open source... who knows?"

Comments

Do you really want to work on this?

[befletch]

I'm torn. The OED is an extremely important resource for the English language, and having more people contribute can only be a good thing. Actually, the Oxford has a history of community contributions so the concept is not entirely new. Just the medium.

On the other hand, online access costs something like US$550/year for a private individual, which just seems a little excessive. It seems a little like getting open source coders to work on your closed source commercial project.

Yes, it is expensive to build and maintain something like the OED and they claim that they're not actually trying to make money, just cover their costs. Here's some numbers in an old Salon article:

http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/09/08/oed/

I guess it just saddens me that access is so unaffordable, when the resource itself is so rich. Am I being unreasonable?

Re:Do you really want to work on this?

[Debillitatus]

I guess it just saddens me that access is so unaffordable, when the resource itself is so rich. Am I being unreasonable?

Maybe you are, maybe you're not. But let me put it in a context for you.

I think it's a bad idea to compare it to coding, open/closed-source, etc. This is not the right paradigm. I think this is more like an academic work. For example, if you write a scholarly article, you submit it to some journal or another. They don't pay you anything, and they even take the copyright. Then they turn around and sell these journals for tons of money. For example, it is common for mathematics journals to cost an institution US$1000 or more a year. The authors of the papers get nothing from this.

Of course, if you're associated with a reasonable university, you'll be able to gain access to these journals as a scholar. So it seems to me that contributing to the OED is completely analogous to scholarly publication.

Inexpensive access to the OED

[Bill Evans]

It's the real thing, too!

Grit your teeth and (gag) join the Quality Paperback Book Club (http://www.qpb.com). Once the dust settles, you get free online access to the OED, as long as you buy a book every six months.

I hate book clubs, but this works for me.