The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary (eSND): work in progress

Abstract

The Scottish National Dictionary (SND) is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present. This paper describes the current project to digitize the SND to produce the eSND, which will eventually be output on the Internet. It includes a brief description of the SND itself, outlining its history, content, and structure, and describes how the eSND will differ from the printed text. The various stages of the eSND project are discussed, using examples from the work in progress: (1) the data capture, which is being achieved through scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) of the printed text; (2) the conversion of the OCR data to full Extensible Markup Language mark-up, including details of the actual mark-up scheme (which is based on the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines), and how this has been adapted to suit the SND text; (3) the integration of the original Supplement and new material; (4) the development of search tools and a Web interface. Details are also given of the new proposal to combine the eSND with an electronic version of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (eDOST), sharing the same mark-up scheme, search software, and interface, to produce a comprehensive electronic resource covering Scots from the early medieval period to the present day.