The Dictionary of Old English

Dictionary of Old English
2011 Progress Report PDF

I begin this report with joy tinged with sadness. Two of the DOE team, Elaine Quanz and Joan Holland, retired this year. Elaine, hired by our founding editor, Angus Cameron, has worked for the project for an astonishing 39 years. It was she who input the more than 3000 texts which now constitute the DOE Corpus, and later encoded it with SGML, adapting to each technological advance with incredible alacrity and good will. Many of you know her, for she has greeted hundreds of visitors over the years on the 14^th floor of Robarts Library. Joan has worked for the project nearly as long as Elaine, arriving in 1974. Her love of entry-writing and her consistently prodigious level of achievement have been invaluable to us. In addition to her role as revising editor, Joan was DOE’s liaison with the OED. Dave McDougall will now assume her responsibilities. We wish Elaine and Joan every good thing in their well-deserved retirement. I will miss them, for I have constantly relied on their keen judgment, common sense and deep concern for our well-being.

Editorial and Technological Advances

The editors are making good progress towards completing the writing of H (the next letter to be published). We are also drafting entries for I/Y, L, M, and N, and the lemmatization of S (the largest letter) is continuing. In order to make our research more accessible, DOE launched a redesigned website in May 2011. One new feature of the website is the Distribution Map of DOE publications. Online visitors now have a visual display of the geographical distribution of users of DOE tools. (Only Antarctica and South America are unrepresented.) Work is progressing well on DOE links to “Parker on the Web”, through funding by the Mellon Foundation. Once the Parker MSS cited in DOE were identified, two DOE research assistants, Paul Langeslag and Stephen Pelle, located the precise folio / page and lines in Parker where textual cruxes occur. Another research assistant, Alex Fleck, has begun to implement links between DOE citations and thumbnail images of “Parker on the Web” using the Digital Mappaemundi tool developed by our colleague Martin Foys and his team. By doing so, we hope to provide users of DOE with the visual evidence for our interpretation of some textual difficulties.

Grants and Gifts

Finding sources of funding is a greater challenge than ever in these recessionary times, and so we are truly grateful to the foundations and individual donors who have provided us with financial support this year. In Spring 2011, we received the happy news that we had been awarded a $500,000 Mellon Challenge grant. We are currently engaged in fundraising to match the Mellon, turning as we have in the past to colleagues in the field as well as foundations for their help. For their assistance in 2011 we are also grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Academy, the Salamander Foundation and the St. George’s Society, Toronto, the Triangle Community Foundation, Raleigh, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New York, the office of the Vice- President-Research, and the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, as well as to the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists and the many colleagues and friends who have continued to support our work. Your generous assistance is vital to ensure the completion of the Dictionary. We would also like to express our warmest appreciation to all those who have given us offprints and books to enhance our library. A list of gifts to the project is appended.

Dissemination and Outreach

On February 12 2011, DOE hosted an Open House for the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium of Graduate Students. About 20 students, mostly from the northeastern United States, toured the project and had the opportunity to learn a little more about its early history and our more recent technological advances. On March 24, the Dictionary hosted a lecture given by Dr. Christine Rauer, St. Andrews University, on “Difficult Readings in the Old English Martyrology”. A reception was given for Dr. Rauer by Prof. Andy Orchard, a member of our International Advisory Committee and Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. We were also very pleased that, on June 10, Professor Michael Lapidge, one of our most distinguished colleagues and one of the first graduates of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University. Prof. Orchard again hosted a joyful celebration at Trinity College. Our Editor, Toni Healey, has represented the project at a number of conferences this year. In January, she attended the Modern Language Association conference in Los Angeles, and reported to the Old English Executive, as she does annually, on the progress of the DOE. In June she attended the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, held this year at McGill University, Montreal. She was recently elected as Member-at-Large of its Executive Committee for a four-year term. In August she and Alex Fleck attended a meeting of the Mellon Cluster group at Dartmouth College, where Alex presented DOE’s plans to link to “Parker”. In September, Toni Healey gave the plenary address at the Atlantic Medieval Association Conference at Dalhousie University, Halifax. We were also delighted that this year the Canadian Society of Medievalists dedicated the most recent volume of its journal Florilegium to a collection of scholarly essays on the DOE. The anthology, Constructing a World One Word at a Time: Papers on the Dictionary of Old English Project, edited by M.J. Toswell, was published as Florilegium 26 (2009). In July, as part of the fundraising initiative for our 2011-2016 Mellon Challenge grant, we extended our outreach to the wider public by uploading a YouTube video. Developed by a graphics designer and funded by a donor, the animated clip highlights Old English and the DOE. We have also received help from the family of our founding editor, Angus Cameron, who created a Facebook page in his memory to help raise matching funds for the Mellon grant, the first use of social media on behalf of the project. Links to both the video and the Facebook page can be found on the DOE website: http://www.doe.utoronto.ca

Staff

Funding

• The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (formerly the Canada Council): Grants in Aid of Research, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975; Major Editorial Grants, 1976 81, 1981-86, 1986-91, 1991-96; Grants from the Federal Matching Funds Policy, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991; Special Presidential Grant, 1993; Consortium Support Programme, 1996-98, 1998 2000, 2000-2003, 2003-2005, 2005-2010
• The British Academy
• Canada Foundation for Innovation (for TAPoR [Text Analysis Portal for Research]), 2002-2007
• Connaught Fund, University of Toronto, 1986-1991
• Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, 1998-99, 1999-2000, 2000-2001, 2002-2003, 2004-2005, 2008-2009, 2010-2011
• Early English Text Society
• Marc Fitch Fund
• Foundation for Education and Social Development, Boston
• Jackman Foundation
• Macdonald-Stewart Foundation
• McLean Foundation, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2009
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1985-90, 1994-99, 2000-2005, 2006-2011, 2009-2011, 2011-2016
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Interoperability Grant, 2011-2013
• Peter Munk Charitable Foundation
• National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Tools Program, 1991-93, 1993-95, 1995-98, 1998-2000, 2000-2002, 2002-2004, 2004-2006, 2006-2008, 2008-2010, 2010-2012
• Presidents' Committee, University of Toronto
• Salamander Foundation, 1998-2001, 2001-2004, 2004-2006, 2006-2008, 2008-2012
• Salus Mundi Foundation, 2002, 2004
• St. George's Society, Toronto, 2007-2012
• Triangle Community Foundation
• University of Toronto
• Xerox Corporation University Grants Committee

Friends of the Dictionary of Old English
in Support of the Mellon Challenge Grant

2010-2011

We wish to acknowledge the very generous contributions the project has received during the past year. Donors who supported our research in honour of or in memory of individuals are also noted separately at the end of the list. We are especially grateful to our International Advisory Committee for their letter of appeal to colleagues in the field to help us meet our Mellon Challenge Grant of $500,000 US. Many of you have received the mailing which was sent out and have already responded generously. All of us on the project thank each one of you. We would like to acknowledge in a special way the donations from the Salamander Foundation and its Director which enabled the first release of funds from the Mellon Foundation. We have also received a generous donation from the Triangle Community Foundation and several large personal donations. We are very grateful to the Cameron family for creating a Facebook page “In memory of Angus Cameron” to help us in our fundraising campaign. An accounting of the funds received will appear in our 2012 report. We hope to have included all who have so generously supported our work, but must apologize to any of our donors inadvertently left off this list of acknowledgements. This list encompasses gifts received between December 15, 2010 and December 15, 2011.