Recent partnerships

The Macroscope

A team at the University of Warwick has spent several years developing a tool called the Macroscope, which allows researchers to explore how word behaviour has changed over time.
 
The tool is designed to provide comprehensive analyses of the semantic and contextual structure of individual words over short- and long-term periods; for instance in charting how a word’s synonyms, collocation patterns, or contextual sentiment changed in a given year.
 
We are working with the University of Warwick team to test and refine the Macroscope using material currently being researched and revised for the OED. This tool has the potential to help inform both the content of the OED’s research and its decisions on which material to prioritize.
 
Visit the Macroscope ⟶

The SAMUELS Project

A recent and particularly notable collaboration in the OED’s longstanding partnership with the University of Glasgow has been on the AHRC-funded SAMUELS project.
 
Standing for Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches, the project brought together researchers from Glasgow and staff from the OED, along with a huge range of other institutions, to build methodologies and tools for the semantic parsing and meaning-based search of historical texts.
 
Among other benefits, this collaboration has helped the OED make strides forward in developing historical corpora to inform, enrich, and complement the dictionary’s work.
 
Visit the SAMUELS Project ⟶

The Sheffield Quotation Tool

This partnership brought together the University of Sheffield’s methodological innovation and the OED’s editorial expertise to build a core database and design an interface to present qualitative and quantitative sense-specific information on quotations in a few clicks.
 
The Quotation Tool was born out of a cross-institutional investigation into ‘DNA of Early Modern Thought’, which used computational analysis of data from Early English Books Online to explore the semantic behaviour of words and development of discourse on particular topics.
 
Building practical tools using the methodologies developed during this project will help to give new focus to the definitions and illustrative quotations the OED offers for Early Modern English.
 
Visit the University of Sheffield's Digital Humanities Institute ⟶

The STRATAS Project

The University of Helsinki has spent many decades building expertise in the construction and investigation of historical corpora of English. We were therefore delighted when a team from the university approached us about a new venture, the Academy of Finland-funded STRATAS project, to automatically detect and track neologisms in their corpus of historical English correspondence.
 
Personal letters offer a window into different linguistic registers from those we find in most historical sources, making them particularly interesting to comb for lexical innovations. We allowed researchers at Helsinki to license OED data to speed up their research, and in return they shared their findings and methodologies with us.
 
Watch our webinar, The OED and historical text collections: discovering new words, with Dr Säily and Dr Mäkelä of the University of Helsinki to find out more about this research.
 
Visit the STRATAS Project ⟶