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?