Find me at MIT7: Media in Transition

Here's the abstract for a paper I'll be presenting at the Media in Transition 7 Conference, to be held May 13-15, 2011 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA.

The Wiki-fication of the Dictionary:  Defining Lexicography in the Digital Age

The future of lexical reference books, such as the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is going to be determined, in part, by the emergence of free on-line dictionaries, such as Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary.

Specifically, we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift of authority in which users, rather than editorial boards, are making decisions concerning the content associated with a lexical entry’s definition. In effect, an exclusive privilege formerly enjoyed by professional lexicographers is ­now being extended unequivocally to laypersons. It is pertinent to ask, therefore, what effect this state of affairs will have on the ways that dictionaries are compiled and used.

For some, including Jill Lepore of the New Yorker Magazine, online collaborative lexical references are “Maoist” resources, “cobble[d]…together” by non-experts who “pilfer” definitions (2006, p. 79). This paper rejects such a characterization and seeks, instead, to provide a description more suitable for critical inquiry.

By contrasting the entry “bomb” as it appears in the OED, Wiktionary, and Urban Dictionary, and by making use of contemporary linguistic theory, the author posits that: word meanings are highly constrained by popular usage; and, in providing users the flexibility to modify entries in real-time, user-generated dictionaries are uniquely practical as catalogues of the current state of language; and, users regularly provide semantically and pragmatically significant, and grammatical accurate, definitions. It is concluded that, whereas traditional dictionaries may be the better resource for diachronic analyses of words, Wiktionary and the like may prove better for synchronic analyses. Finally, if traditional references are going to remain relevant, they may need to incorporate collaborative functionality.