=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2865/poster6
|storemode=property
|title=Legacy Data in a Digital Age
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2865/poster6.pdf
|volume=Vol-2865
|authors=Ellert Thor Johannsson,Simonetta Battista,Tarrin Wills
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/dhn/JohannssonBW20
}}
==Legacy Data in a Digital Age==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2865/poster6.pdf
Legacy Data in a Digital Age
Ellert Thor Johannsson, Simonetta Battista and Tarrin Wills [0000-0001-5360-3495]
1A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, dept. of Nordic Studies, University of Copenhagen
ellert@hum.ku.dk, sb@hum.ku.dk, tarrin@hum.ku.dk
Abstract. In this article we discuss the evolution of data collection and use in the
context of A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP), which is a dictionary cover-
ing the medieval language of Iceland and Norway. This dictionary started as a
collection of citations on paper slips, which were later used as the lexicographical
material for a multi-volume, but incomplete, print edition. Today the citations
form the basis of the digital version of ONP, currently available online at
onp.ku.dk [1]. We account for the evolution of the data within three different
periods, separated by certain milestones. We demonstrate how the legacy data
have evolved and been enhanced throughout the years to provide innovative ways
to bring together and take advantage of all the information gathered by ONP dur-
ing its existence.
Keywords: Lexicography, Online Dictionary, Databases.
1 Introduction
A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) is a historical dictionary, which covers the
language of Iceland and Norway in the Middle Ages. This dictionary began as an ex-
tensive collection of citations on paper slips, which were excerpted from all known
works of Old Norse Prose texts. Later developments include a multi-volume, but in-
complete, print publication and an online lexicographic tool [1], providing detailed in-
formation about the vocabulary of Old Norse and its textual foundation in medieval
manuscripts and documents.
Even though the semantic analysis of the vocabulary is not yet fully completed, the
wide scope of the dictionary is evident by the fact that its archive of around 800.000
example citations represents around 7% of the estimated 11 million word corpus of Old
Norse prose from known sources. The long history of the project provides an oppor-
tunity to study the development of the data and how they have been used during the
time the project has been in existence.
The goal of this article is to account for the legacy data of ONP and how they have
been acquired, organized and utilized. For that purpose, we divide the history of the
dictionary into three periods that roughly coincide with the three stages of its develop-
ment. The first period extends from the foundation of the dictionary to the making of
its first database; the second period covers the early computer assisted lexicographic
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under
Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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work until the establishment of the online version of the dictionary and the third period
spans from the launch of the online dictionary until present times.
2 1st Period – The Early Days
Work on this dictionary began in 1939 long before computers and databases became
available. The nature of the material and the editorial principles set out by the founders
of the project demanded a wide variety of data be collected and organized [2]. This
primarily involved excerpting the source material for representative examples of word
use.
2.1 The Data
The essence of the dictionary is the collection of example citations which today number
more than 800.000, each of which is provided with a sentence illustrating a specific
form and/or meaning of the headword, a detailed reference showing the work of origin
as well as page and line number.
Fig. 1. The medieval manuscript is edited in a scholarly edition, which in turn is excerpted by
underlining relevant citations and writing them down on paper slips.
Most citations came into being in the early days when the dictionary staff would read
scholarly text editions in order to collect significant examples of word use by underlin-
ing sentences that contained a lemma in its syntactic context (cf. Fig 1). Once the ex-
amples had been selected, a copyist would write down each example sentence on a
paper slip with the relevant information. In some cases where a scholarly edition was
lacking, words were excerpted directly from the manuscript sources. Around 9% of the
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total number of excerpted citations contain a direct reference to a manuscript. Addi-
tional information was also noted on the slips, e.g. variant manuscript readings, textual
commentary or corresponding words from foreign sources. The slips were then filed in
a physical archive. Further detail about the slips and the information they contain can
be found in [3].
Besides the citations, it was important to record various information relating to the
source material. Structuring these data involved creating an index of all the different
medieval works, which had been excerpted. The citations included a reference to schol-
arly editions as well as the manuscripts these were based on, and all this information
had to be registered. In addition to this, various other data were gathered about the
medieval texts, such as the dating of manuscripts, bibliographic details about editions
and secondary literature, as well as other supplementary information. In the early days
this work was also registered on paper through various filing systems.
3 2nd Period – The Database and Print Publication
In the 1980s, the potential advantages of working with the data in a database structure
became clear and work began on developing the necessary digital tools to process the
dictionary material. The ideal database needed to accommodate all the dictionary cita-
tions as well as the data related to the source material. An evaluation report of the pro-
ject from 1993 gives an insight into the thought process and considerations behind the
design of the database [4].
After experimenting with various options, an Oracle-based SQL database became
the IT solution of choice for bringing together the complex data ONP had gathered
throughout the years. The interconnectivity of the data demanded the creation of many
different database tables, and sets of tables, where all the pieces of information were
stored in separate fields.
In total, the database included more than 200 tables that were used in varying de-
grees in the dictionary making process. The most important ones are the wordlist table,
headword table, definition table, citation table, as well as tables for references to edi-
tions, secondary literature and other glossaries. The tables were linked together through
common fields. This allowed supplying information relating to both the source material
and each citation, e.g. the notation of the geographical provenience of the manuscripts
and the grouping of the source material by literary genres.
The benefits of organizing the information in a database were immediate. Once the
content from the hand-written index registry had been entered into the database a
printed index volume could be published in 1989 [5]. Even though this volume is pri-
marily conceived to facilitate the use of the then unpublished dictionary, it stands alone
as an independent reference work covering Old Norse prose texts and their manuscript
origins.
There were further challenges when introducing the new technology because of the
nature of the material, especially the widespread use of non-standardized characters and
symbols. In many cases, the system developer had to combine standard symbols to cre-
251
ate special characters. This led to the development of a tailor-made ONP font. Eventu-
ally the dictionary implemented sufficient technical resources to facilitate the structur-
ing of dictionary entries for each of the 65.000 headwords and begin the work of pub-
lishing them.
3.1 Print Dictionary
The organizing of information in a database was undertaken with the end goal in mind
to publish the dictionary entries in traditional printed volumes. Once the citations had
been keyed into the database the editors could proceed with the structuring of dictionary
entries, writing definitions, supplying extra grammatical information, as well as infor-
mation about collocations and syntactic relations. This work resulted in an ambitious
publishing plan of 12 dictionary volumes along with the aforementioned index volume.
Three printed volumes were eventually published from 1995 to 2004, containing entries
that cover the alphabet from a-em [6]. Even though the print publication was well re-
ceived, it had its limitations. It took about five years to prepare each volume and space
restrictions meant that many citations remained unpublished.
4 3rd Period – Online Dictionary
After the publication of the third volume, the print edition was put on hold. The project
underwent another restructuring process, which resulted in an online version made
available in 2010. An important step in the conversion of the paper dictionary into a
full-fledged digital online dictionary was the scanning of ca. 500.000 hand-written pa-
per slips, which were integrated into the database and linked to the same fields as the
typed citations [3]. The digitalization process also included scanning scholarly editions
to provide extended context for each example.
Fig. 2. The editing interface after digitalization, with five database tables, as well as a scanned
slip for each citation and a scanned page from a relevant text edition.
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After this restructuring, the database could be used efficiently in the editorial work with
all the information being available to the dictionary staff. The new editing interface
provided access to all the legacy data as well as additional information about each cita-
tion and each medieval source text (cf. Fig 2).
The database also became an essential part of the published dictionary as online users
could query the database directly and search the data in different ways, being no longer
limited by the alphabetical order of printed dictionary entries. Besides headword search,
the database structure made it possible to tailor the search to particular parts of speech
or lexical items [7]. Scanned slips and editions proved also to be very useful for online
users as they now could access the dictionary information even in cases where the head-
words had not been edited yet.
4.1 Enhancing the Data and Web Applications
Since 2010 the online version of ONP has been gradually expanded with new edited
entries and improved with additional search capabilities, such as text provenance and
literary genre. Moreover, the dictionary data have been enhanced by linking them in-
ternally and to other digital resources. These expanded functions constitute an im-
portant part of the redesigned website and user interface, which was launched in 2019.
The prominent components of this new website are two new web applications: an
integrated web publishing and editing application, and a fast, archivable public inter-
face. Both applications use the dictionary’s Oracle RDBMS back-end and an interface
using PHP that interacts with the database to generate HTML and/or JSON output. The
applications use Bootstrap as the HTML framework and user interaction is coded in
JavaScript. These new applications take advantage of SQL in joining multiple tables in
complex queries and allow for linking in various ways between the semantic tree and
citations, pages and headwords [8]. A discussion of the website functions along with a
description of the data structure and an overview of technical features is also found in
[8].
The applications allow the user to interact with the data in many different ways as
well as to access other dictionaries and resources (cf. Fig. 3), including digital editions
of Old Norse texts and manuscript images [9].
Fig. 3. ONP Online provides references to older dictionary works in association with each entry.
This screenshot shows information from two older dictionaries.
253
One important innovation is the “ONP Reader”, which provides the user with glossaries
to scholarly text editions (cf. Fig. 4). This allows the user to access all the words ex-
cerpted from each page of a particular text [8]. Since ONP tends to excerpt many texts
in great detail, the “ONP Reader” has expanded the dictionary’s potential user base to
students and others less familiar with non-standard Old Norse texts. With all its extra
features and easy access to secondary supplementary information, ONP stands as an
even more important research tool for scholars in medieval Scandinavian language, lit-
erature, and culture.
Fig. 4. An example page displayed in the “ONP Reader” of ONP Online. A selected section of
words from line 12 has been enlarged here to facilitate reading.
5 Conclusions
In this article, we have shown how legacy data of the ONP dictionary, originally only
organized in paper filing systems, have been structured in a database and improved in
various ways throughout the project’s history. The original data still provide the basis
of the lexicographic work, and constitute a unique collection of representative exam-
ples. The database structure and linking of information has facilitated the use of these
data in many different ways, and made them accessible to users from all over the world,
long before the editing of the dictionary has been completed. Search capabilities made
possible in the online digital version of the dictionary and later linking of the data to
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external sources further enhance the value of the legacy data and provide innovative
ways to bring together and take advantage of all the information gathered by ONP dur-
ing its existence.
References
1. ONP Online = Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose
Online. Accessed at: http://onp.ku.dk, last accessed 2020/10/10
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G.E.C. GADS Forlag, Copenhagen (1964).
3. Johannsson, E.: “Integrating analog citations into an online dictionary”. In: Navarretta, C.,
Agirrezabal, M., Maegaard, B. (eds.). Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic
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istry of Education and Research, Copenhagen (1993).
5. ONP Registre = Degnbol, H., Jacobsen, B. C., Rode, E., Sanders, C. & Helgadóttir, Þ. (eds.).
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