I just finished reading Simon WInchester’s The Meaning of Everything, about the Oxford English Dictionary. What I knew already, but what I found interesting considering the current digital trends, was the way an army of volunteers worked on the project.
The main editor James Murray, sent a call to the English speaking lands for readers to scour books to find words and the quotations to match them. 800 readers ultimately sent little slips with headwords and quotations to Oxford, where they were received at the rate of 1000 a day. You can see in this picture the pigeon holes where the slips were organized.
Aside from the hundreds of towns and villages in the British Isles that provided enthusiastic new readers, there are submissions written from would be volunteers living in Austria, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Holland, New South Wales, Indiana, Calcutta, New York, San Francisco, Ceylon, Arkansas, New Zealand, and Wisconsin
He didn’t mention Canada, but oh well.
It would be interesting to me to compare the lines of code in the Linux kernel to the amount of text in the OED. I wonder if the amount of work done for the Dictionary is the upper amount of work that can be humanly possible without the use of computer systems. In many ways the OED resembles the centralized and controlled chaos of the Linux kernel.
At the bottom we have the people who submit patches, equal to the volunteer readers. Next we have the people who are responsible for their respective sections, I don’t know, memory handlers and input/output drivers and such. They resemble the assistant editors whose job it was to take the quotations, sort them out, and make some sense of them regarding age of the quotation and reliability of the source. Next to last we have Andrew Morton, right hand man to Linus, who is represented by Henry Bradley, who himself was responsible for some sections of the Dictionary, working concurrently to Murray (and who in turn became editor when Murray died). And at the top, James Murray, who stood on the shoulders of all those who helped to make the final decision about what got in and what was kept out and how best to package the entire thing.
I mean, granted, it was Victorian England: most of the contributors were very learned and the women who did contribute were totally left out of being credited by name in the first printings. But, to do all that without even a typewriter is stupendous.
Actually, you can still contribute to the OED, though they don’t let you see the whole thing for free.
I just found your blog thanks to Blog day and Life as I Know It, which I found thanks to someone else. . . which in turn reminds me of another book about the OED, Caught in the Web of Words. I haven’t read it, but my mother says it’s good.
September 1st, 2006, at 3:44 pm #And I meant to say, my mother was at the U of Toronto (though in English, not library science) back in the early 1970s.
September 1st, 2006, at 3:45 pm #That other book is written by K.M. Elisabeth Murray, I wonder how she is related to James Murray, and if it is more of a biographical sketch.
And your mother, she came to U of T for her grad or undergraduate work?
Anyway, thanks for stopping by for a bit. I’ve been a lurker on your library blog for a while.
September 2nd, 2006, at 8:47 am #