Democratizing digital lexicography: an infrastructure to facilitate the creation and dissemination of electronic dictionaries.

FAIN: HAA-290402-23

Mangalam Centers (Berkeley, CA 94704-1418)
Ligeia Lugli (Project Director: June 2022 to present)
Regiani Aparecida Santos-Zacarias (Co Project Director: June 2022 to present)

A series of virtual planning meetings for the development of a prototype platform for builders of digital lexical resources and dictionaries for under resourced languages.

The project supports the creation and dissemination of digital dictionaries for low-resource languages. With many world languages at risk of extinction, online dictionaries & glossaries are increasingly crucial. Unfortunately, the languages most in need of such resources have the biggest challenges. The availability of digital infrastructure for a language is proportional to its representation - the more data that is available in digital format, the easier it becomes to automatically process it. Conversely, the less a language/culture is represented online, the higher the costs of retrieving and processing data about it. We propose to prototype a digital infrastructure that can help redress this inequality by drastically reducing the costs/technical expertise required to create, publish and maintain online dictionaries. A series of iterative development cycles will bring together user-testers, identify their needs, and prepare an alpha-prototype application to address these needs.