The Digital Dinneen Project : Further Avenues for CELT

Rev. Patrick Stephen Dinneen’s Irish-English Dictionary is widely regarded as the most
authoritative scholarly dictionary of modern Literary Irish currently available. Published in 1934, it has seen numerous reprints, but is not available in digital form. Indeed, no scholarly Irish-English dictionary of modern Literary Irish is available in digital form.
The Corpus of Electronic Texts, supported by the Irish
Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, has embarked upon a three year project to deliver a digital version of Dinneen’s Dictionary. The Research Associate responsible for the preparation of the Digital Dinneen is Julianne Nyhan, and the Principal Investigator on the project is Professor Donnchadh Ó Corráin, University College Cork (hereafter UCC). Dr Gregory Toner, from the University of Ulster at Coleraine, and Dr Seán Ua Súilleabháin from the Department of Modern Irish at UCC, are associate investigators.
Dinneen’s dictionary is a complicated document that contains a wealth of information. Its data comprises, inter alia, headwords, grammatical information, definitions, usage examples and translations, as well as references to dialectical sources and to informants used by Dinneen. This paper will briefly discuss the TEI mark-up of other Irish language dictionaries, such as the eDIL (electronic
Dictionary of the Irish language). The use of TEI to
encode Dinneen will then be illustrated, and the necessary
customisations briefly discussed.
In addition to creating a digital edition of Dinneen, the research assistant is endeavouring to develop an edition that is more user-friendly that the hard copy edition of the same work. Much of the information contained in the dictionary remains inaccessible even to experienced speakers of the language, because the hard copy contains
mixed font (Cló Gaelach/Roman), and many people are not able to read Cló Gaelach. This barrier will be
removed from the digital edition, and end-users will have the choice of viewing the text in either mixed font or Roman font only. Furthermore, the dictionary contains orthographic forms that pre-date the spelling reform
of 1946, and as many current day speakers are
unfamiliar with such orthography, they have difficult
locating headwords. The systematic incorporation of
modern orthographic forms as meta-data will enable
access for modern speakers who are unfamiliar with
historical spelling - and today they are probably the
majority of Irish speakers.
This paper will focus on how the Digital Dinneen will be integrated into the existing CELT infrastructure, and into the wider infrastructure of Humanities Computing in Irish. An electronic Lexicon of variants of medieval Irish, the subject of Julianne Nyhan’s PhD research, will become available on the CELT website in 2006/2007. Incorporating id references into Dinneen will allow end users to trace a word back to its medieval form in the Lexicon of variants. Furthermore, for the last two years, CELT has been involved in a cross-border collaboration
with the University of Ulster at Coleraine, where
an electronic edition of the Dictionary of the Irish
Language (eDIL) is being prepared. It is hoped that links between Dinneen and the eDIL will be easily generated. The research carried out at CELT into an XSLT lookup tool to facilitate links between works cited in eDIL, and the corresponding text in the CELT corpus, will also
be extended to Dinneen. This mechanism will enable scholars on-line access to works cited by Dinneen - many of which are available only in the best research libraries. A Javascript plug-in, that enables end users of the CELT corpus to highlight a word, click on a lookup icon and
retrieve the word in question from either the Lexicon of medieval Irish or the Digital Dinneen will also be
discussed. Finally, the possibilities for future research will be touched upon, for example, the possibility of augmenting Dinneen’s citations with examples from the CELT corpus as more texts are added to it.