Stages in the project
Electronic recording of the existing material.
The text of the existing three volumes (Bierbaumer 1975-79) [History], which were published off-set, contains an enormous amount of detail. Therefore it would not be feasible to re-type the entire text, which is why the text has been scanned and is now being recognised using OCR-software. The results of this work are encouraging, but the reconstruction of the text and the merging of the three volumes into one will take a considerable amount of time.
Systematic revision of material
During and after the implementation of the first step the existing German text will be revised and merged systematically. The new output will be recorded in English. This revision will be accompanied by the following two steps: First a considerable amount of the relevant literature published since the publication of Botanischer Wortschatz des Altenglischen has to be reviewed; due to the increased interest in this topic most of it is from recent years. The other step will be the collection and discussion of botanical vocabulary not covered in the first three volumes.
Creation of a web-based data-base and work-platform
This web-site is designed to be the center of our project: Not only does it provide a detailed description of our intended work and function as a work-platform for our co-operation with the University of Munich, but it is also be the portal to the new data-base powered dictionary. Development and programming has started in mid 2006, with the main focus on data-base-development and data-input. The front-end prototype was launched in autumn of 2007. Data and Software are updated continually [Updates]. In summer 2008 our database included all Old English lemmata with identification, all occurrences, and some sample entries: āc, bēowyrt, cicena mete, dægesēage, lēac, mistel, nædderwyrt, sigelhweorfa, wermōd (all data as of 1979).
Updates and new features planned for 2008-2010
The ASPNS symposium and our constant work with the data on Old English plant-names created (and still create) a lot of ideas what a web-platform, an online dictionary, and even a web based research tool should provide. For the second project phase we plan broad changes concerning data, data-retrieval, and community-features. Some of these will be:
- The citations of the current occurrences have to be brought in line with the conventions of the Corpus of Old English so that a persistent uniformity of reference can be guaranteed. [Edit (2011): Remained in beta status.]
- An important supplement is a direct link to the Corpus of Old English, which would provide the most convenient connection between tie Dictionary of Old English Plant names and the Old English texts themselves. A similar connection can be set up to the Dictionary of Old English and the Oxford English Dictionary, or the online version of An Anglo-Saxon dictionary by Bosworth and Toller. Starting from the Old English / Modern English plant-name the user is able to access the respective websites and use their facilities. [Edit (2011): The only external link available on an open access basis is to the An Anglo-Saxon dictionary.]
- We want to provide a plant name specific bibliography of primary and secondary literature generated from the titles used to discuss each lemma.
- We want to introduce some new aspects: place name data and the relationship of plant-names and place-names. We also want to design the database to hold data on the location of the place (recorded in keyhole markup language), which in turn can be used with, for example, Google Earth to display the locations on a map.[Edit (2011): Remained in beta status.]
- We intend to include a forum, the feature that users can comment on entries or add information, upload of images, input of place-names and location data, or the possibility to share searches from the Clicktionary, and so on. Other improvements will be a tool for statistical analysis which will remodel the various available counts (e.g. OE lemma count, count of plant names from e.g. the Epinal-Erfurt glossary) into appropriate graphs and diagrams. [Edit (2011): Feature dismissed.]