Digital resources

 

Digital resources

Nowadays, the paper quotation slips that constitute the Dictionary's primary corpus are supplemented by systematic searching of two major electronic databases: the Patrologia Latina, the digitized version of the miscellaneous compilation of editions of medieval texts assembled in the 19th century by Jacques-Paul Migne; and the more recent scholarly Library of Latin Texts, which includes texts from the Corpus Christianorum series and other critical editions. Together, these allow us to search the works of nearly 60 British authors, from Gildas in the 6th century to Ockham in the 14th, for any words or senses that may have slipped through the net.

The project also has printed concordances — complete alphabetical indexes of words in their contexts — prepared for the project in the 1980s from digitized texts of a number of important works. These include works by Asser, Wulfstan, Frithegod, William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, and Osbern of Gloucester, as well as the texts of charters from Anglo-Saxon England. Particularly in the days before fully searchable electronic texts were available, these enabled us easily to locate additional examples of words and senses across the centuries and broaden our picture of their usage. Even now these concordances remain a regularly used convenient and efficient research tool for texts that are not yet generally available electronically.

A further electronic resource, newly available to the project and at present only usable by the members of the team, is the raw digital text captured for the dictionary published so far and for that part in preparation. We are able to search this text for all kinds of helpful material including relevant quotations, connections to other related or parallel entries, and so on.

In addition to enabling us to identify new and additional evidence, we make extensive use of digital resources in verifying quotations.