University of Central Florida researchers receive NEH grant to preserve Noah Webster’s dictionaries online

The project will engage undergraduate and graduate students to transform the dictionaries into searchable digital editions, preserving the texts that helped define and document American English

University of Central Florida

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

UCF Associate Professor of English Beth Young leads the project to preserve Noah Webster's dictionaries online.

view more 

Credit: UCF

Long before spell check and online dictionaries made definitions a click away, Noah Webster set out to document American English, which was still taking shape. More than two centuries later, UCF researchers are helping preserve his work for a new generation.

Researchers in UCF’s Department of English and Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) are slated to receive nearly $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create searchable digital editions of Webster’s historic dictionaries, giving scholars, educators and the public unprecedented access to foundational texts that helped shape American English.

The two-year grant will support Noah Webster’s Dictionary Online: Preserving America’s Revolutionary Language Heritage. The project is led by Beth Young, associate professor of English, with co-principal investigators CHDR Associate Director Brook Miller and Professor of English Mark Kamrath, who is co-director of CHDR.

The project will also expand educational opportunities for UCF students.

Undergraduate and graduate students will contribute to proofreading, digital editing and semantic text tagging while gaining internship and research experience across several academic programs. Postdoctoral fellow Abigail Moreshead will help conduct research and supervise the student team, and XML (extensible markup language) Specialist William Dorner  will oversee the technical encoding.

Bringing Webster’s Words Into the Digital Age

The project builds on two previous NEH-funded digital humanities initiatives. Drawing on the experience of creating Johnson’s Dictionary Online, the team will create comprehensive digital editions of Webster’s The Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) and An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

“Noah Webster believed that our new nation needed its own language, not just its own government,” says Young, an affiliate scholar with CHDR. “He correctly predicted that American English would one day be spoken by ‘300 millions’ of people. This grant enables us to provide digital editions of Webster’s dictionaries that are as reliable, accurate and searchable as today’s scholarship demands.”

Unlike existing online versions, which primarily consist of scanned pages or basic text transcriptions, the new editions will include advanced search capabilities, complete transcriptions, high-quality images and scholarly annotations.

The team aims to complete the searchable 1828 edition in time for its 200th anniversary in 2028, followed by the 1806 edition.

Together, the dictionaries capture American English as it was developing during the nation’s formative years, preserving the language used in early American law, politics, education and everyday life.

The project also builds on the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, an initiative led by Mark Kamrath that aims to identify, transcribe, organize and ultimately edit the post-revolutionary author’s uncollected writings, making them searchable in an electronic environment. Webster’s dictionaries are from the same era and provide a bridge to understanding Brockden’s texts.

More Than a Dictionary

Webster’s dictionaries remain valuable resources for literary, historical and legal scholarship more than two centuries after their publication. According to the project proposal, courts continue to reference the dictionaries when interpreting the original meaning of constitutional and legal terms, while educators use them to help students understand the language of America’s founding era. The UCF team has already seen evidence of this type of use with Johnson’s Dictionary Online, with the resource being cited by The Atlantic, The New York Times, and U.S. federal and district courts.

By making the texts easier to search and study, the project will enable users to explore Webster’s work in ways that scans can’t.

CHDR’s Susan Xiao will serve as the project’s lead programmer, overseeing development of the digital platform that will power the searchable editions. The website currently hosts full-page images and will ultimately feature advanced search tools, scholarly annotations, and high-resolution entry images designed to make Webster’s landmark dictionaries more accessible to researchers, educators, and the public.

CHDR will host and maintain the project, building on its experience supporting digital humanities initiatives.

 

Noah Webster’s Dictionary Online: Preserving America’s Revolutionary Language Heritage will be made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.