OED: 500 years of distributed development

Perhaps it makes sense that Oxford University Press, a product of the first information technology boom would, 500 years later, be a leader in a different kind of revolution.  Still, it’s hard to look that building and those columns and think of zeros and ones. And maybe that is the point. OUP’s flagship publication, the Oxford English Dictionary, is not just a product of technology but of people. In fact, an article over the weekend in the FT magazine makes it clear that tracking the history of the English language has always been a social project. Describing the daunting process of the first edition–which took its first principal editor James Murray and his team more than 50 years to complete–Richard Tomkins explains how the OED was probably one of the first examples of so-called ‘distributed’ work.

The way he [Murray} gathered these [historical references] was through a reading programme, asking people to read books and literature of all kinds, past and present, to collect examples of word uses and write them down on index cards that could be collated with other examples of the same word’s use. Thousands of readers, mostly unpaid and many of them responding to a public appeal Murray made in 1879, provided the OED with millions of quotations from written English.

Now there has been much recent talk of the power of networks, specifically the advantages of connecting millions and millions of people across a wide range of class, place, etc., but I have yet to see that killer app that takes advantage of this new reality. Most famously, Jay Rosen and company at newassignment.net have begun to explore the impact of networks on journalism and information gathering and my instinct is that they will surely succeed in some fashion but barring a few minor political projects there has been no great success as of yet.

Why isn’t the OED the perfect playground? Digital technology has already transformed the task as hand. As Tomkins points out, the original contributors to the first edition could only read “a small fraction of the material that was available at the time.” Now, as the staff at OUP begin the uneviable task of rewriting each entry, shouldn’t they be harnessing all of us out here? What better way to track the history of language, indeed “history through language”, than the enlistment of millions of connected english speakers throughout the world towards the task of chronicling word usage and examples?

This is not completely new of course, the OUP already has a TV show, Balderdash and Piffle, on the subject and has even posted this rather halfhearted attempt at engaging the public on their site. But I want a little more, a site where a little interaction could happen, so that a guy thinking about the origin of ‘Banana’ in Sheffield can work together with the woman in Hong Kong thinking about the same thing (see, its a little word-based social network). With a little help, I bet this edition will only take a paltry 30 years. Hold me to it.

Add comment March 7th, 2007