Language - John Willinsky on net loss and gain: e-OED
In the beginning, some 116 years ago, you could subscribe to A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, with the first issue or fascicle spanning "A" to "ANT", although it took 40 years to compile the whole of what we now know as the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. On 14 March, Oxford University Press launched OED Online, providing access not simply to the internet version of the second edition, but also to a work in progress: over the next decade, the OED is being totally revised, and is expected to double in size.
This is the end of the OED as we know it: "OED Online will be the dictionary in future," declares its chief editor John Simpson. Shed what tears you will over this net loss for book publishing, but others will be searching the new e-OED on their wireless Palm Pilot as they read the paper on the train . They will e-mail definitions to the friend with whom they've wagered on a meaning. And, if perchance the word is not in the OED or is inadequately defined for their purposes, they can enter the citation in which they've found the word for the editors to consider for future entry in the ongoing revision of the OED.
All this for an annual subscription fee of £350 for individuals, with site licences for universities and libraries from £600-£2,000. The annual fee exceeds the price of the one-volume compact OED (£225), but the OED Online is more dictionary than you can buy in this or any other form: it combines past and current supplements, promises to bring 1,000 new and revised entries every quarter, drawn from OUP's £34m programme embracing the use of English in Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas, as well as in South Park, Seinfeld, and Blackadder (O brave new words!). The technological advantages of OED Online include an ability to search for words you have hardly a clue how to spell, or by language of origin and date of first usage. Centuries of language and literature are now just one click away.
It would be easy to go on about the artful transfer of page to screen, which combines the traditional layout of the OED - itself a typographic breakthrough in its orderly, informative use of typefaces and spacing - with coloured fonts and minty-white lozenge buttons for navigation. But there is a more important issue involving OED Online, now that this great dictionary has taken its place within the new information economy. The web has proven itself a powerful broadcasting and publishing medium, but the changing definition of public and private space that the web implies is only beginning to emerge. Information on the web - whether it concerns the news, finance, sports, health, education, government, or research - is increasingly a matter of sponsorship or subscription.
Last autumn, for example, Encyclopedia Britannica dropped its online subscription service, let its door-to-door sales force go, and offered free access to Britannica.com - that is, access paid for by the ads flashing at the top, bottom, and side of the page. This has made Britannica.com (and the accompanying Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary) instantly available to the growing number of homes and classrooms with internet connections across the English-speaking world. By this move, Britannica instantly recast itself from a major investment in knowledge for libraries and families to a popular, ubiquitous medium, much like an online newspaper and magazine.
Only 22 per cent of Britons currently access the internet, but Tony Blair has made universal access to the web a target for 2005. With everyone able to tap in, the second "digital divide" - between haves and have-nots - will develop between private (subscription) and public (sponsored) sources of knowledge.
The concern to foster greater public access has always been at the heart of the OED, which began as a work of common, as much as uncommon, readers. Its first editor, the schoolteacher and amateur linguist James Murray, established a tradition of inviting reader participation in the OED. The OED's authority has always rested, in part, on this democratic invitation to participate, sans academie, in shaping the language's best record. Its acknowledged weakness has always been about limits to that participation. The online project will extend participation to those previously excluded, although it is the OED's 300 expert staff and advisers who will still define, more than any other body, an official sense of how the English language is constituted.
We all have reason to watch what this interactive, online dictionary makes of the untamable and energetic qualities of the language that Samuel Johnson celebrated in the preface of his dictionary. I'm encouraged by the reported interest shown by British universities, libraries, and schools in OED Online's reasonable educational rates. I also think it admirable that "different price bands" will apply to institutions in developing countries. It will enable greater use of this wonderful dictionary, encouraging linguistic and literary wandering, with much scrolling through the thickets of citations and clicking among cross-references, touching down here and there in the language's history, usage, and meanings.
One can get over the missing heft and delicacy of volume and page, ink and column. A dictionary, in a necessarily permanent state of revision, lends itself, if any book does, to web publishing. One can also wonder about where we're going with this new publishing medium, and specifically what will come of greater public engagement with this dictionary's formidable stock of learning. It could well prove a net gain for the state of public knowledge.
John Willinsky, author of Empire of Words: the reign of the OED and more recently Technologies of Knowing, teaches at the University of British Columbia
The website for OED Online is: www.oed.com
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