DSNA 23: DSNA's 23rd Biennial Conference: Fitness of Our Dictionaries and Lexicography to 21st-Century Realities Virtual, NJ, United States, June 4, 2021

CALL FOR PAPERS

DSNA-23: Fitness of Our Dictionaries and Lexicography to 21^st-Century Realities

June 4, 2021

North American Eastern Time: 10:00 am – 3:30 pm  (GMT 15:00 – 20:30)

Abstracts are invited for paper presentations at the DSNA-23 meeting, to be held virtually on June 4, 2021. Papers should be centrally relevant to one of the panel topics described below and at the very top of the abstract should specify the number of the panel for which the paper is proposed. Presentations are limited to 15 minutes and must be pre-recorded. Each panel will include a 15-minute live Q&A following presentation of the three papers.

The organizers encourage submission of public-facing papers, with appeal to a wider audience than ordinarily attends a DSNA conference. Fifteen-minute papers cannot attempt a state-of-the-art picture but should aim to describe or critique an aspect of the topic theme. All abstract submitters must be willing to pre-record their presentation and to be virtually present during the entire panel in order to participate in the Q&A. Authors of papers accepted for panel presentation will receive guidelines for preparing their recordings.

Each trio of panel presentations is planned to form the core of a forum to be published in Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. In addition, select abstracts for which there is no space within the allotted panel time will be invited for possible inclusion in the published forum; papers submitted to the journal will be refereed in accordance with journal practices.

An outline of the conference program can be viewed at https://dictionarysociety.com/conference/

All presenters must register for the conference. Registration opens on March 1^st; details will be available on the conference website.

ABSTRACTS

Abstracts, to be submitted via Easy Chair, will comprise three parts: the number of the panel for which the paper is proposed and the paper’s title; an abstract of 350-500 words (excluding references); any references. No self-identifying information should appear in the abstract. An example for the first line of the submission could read: “Panel 2. How the Toronto Star Promotes Canadian Neologisms: A Corpus-Based Analysis”. Papers need not be submitted at this time; the conference committee will contact authors regarding their paper.

Deadline for abstract submission is March 5th at 11:59pm North American Eastern time. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by the beginning of April.

PANEL DESCRIPTIONS

Panel 1: How global and national events affect modern lexicography

Online dictionaries are able to adapt speedily to rapid changes in vocabulary and usage. As an example, Covid-19 and the pandemic have spawned a range of new words and new applications for existing words, such as contact tracing, community spread, flatten the curve, PPE, social distancing, and Covid-19 itself. Who monitors these and similar developments for dictionaries? Who writes or revises the definitions? How do lexicographers keep up with global and national changes in vocabulary and word meanings? How does the proliferation of new vocabulary affect established lexicographical approaches? We welcome abstracts that explore any aspect of dictionaries and lexicography addressing lightning-speed developments in the lexicon.

Panel 2: Dictionaries in the public eye

Dictionaries continue to carry significant authority in the professional and personal lives of people in all walks of life and all stations. Courts in the US and Britain increasingly cite dictionaries as evidence for the meaning of even everyday words. Lexicographers and dictionary publishers now use social media in savvy ways to engage more users. Reporters are fascinated with new words and how they get into dictionaries, and they pay a good deal of attention to contests about words (e.g., WOTY, spelling bees, political gaffes). Teachers and students increasingly turn to online resources for authoritative word explanations and definitions – sometimes online dictionaries from established publishers and sometimes not. How do common understandings – or misunderstandings – of dictionaries and their authority manifest in how users approach these issues? What trends can we find in the attention to dictionaries in the public forum? How should dictionaries adapt to each of these audiences and common uses of dictionaries – or should they? We welcome abstracts that explore any aspect of dictionaries and lexicography in public forums or these questions in particular.

Panel 3: The future of dictionaries and lexicography

While a dictionary’s word list (entry list) and definitions have traditionally been the work of humans – lexicographers – they are now increasingly generated semi-automatically from large text datasets (corpora). New working models are emerging in which digital humanities, corpus linguistics, linked data, NLP, and machine learning are applied to the selection of illustrative quotations, disambiguation of word senses, choice of labels, and writing of definitions themselves. How efficient and accurate are these computational methods when compared to those of humans? Will human lexicographers always be needed? Will some computer programs be able to generate definitions on the fly and provide the information users expect? And will the notion of “the dictionary” need redefining as a result? We welcome abstracts that explore any aspect of the future of dictionaries and lexicography in general, or these questions in particular.