Re: email-tutoring

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, David J. Coogan wrote:

> 
> 
> On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, Sara Kimball wrote:
> > Hmm, it might be kind of cool
> > to make a truly interactive hypertext dictionary where readers could **add*
> > their own links easily.  It might get pretty confusing pretty fast too if
> > there were many readers involved.
> > 
> > 
> > -->  This, I think, is the crucial difference.  Because when we start
> doing that kind of thing, we'll have to admit, finally, that dictionaries
> have always been biased by some group who had THE AUTHORITY to determine
> which defintions would count. 

Yeah, some melange of editors, copyeditors, and the people who typeset the
thing.  I had a friend who worked for Houghton Miflin on the American
Heritage dictionary third ed. and because he'd done a stint in a seminary
he got to do religious definitions.  One of the terms he had to define was
"Jesus Christ."  **Everybody** tried to take a hand in that definition ;-) 
Actually, some lexicographers are uneasy about
this authority, but if they're perceived as abdicating that authority,
they get creamed like Webster's Third did.

> 
> What I enjoy most about technology studies is that it seems to force us,
> sometimes unwillingly, into conclusions like that.  Do we really want a
> dictionary that includes my thoughts and your thoughts?  What value is
> there in that?

There's an interesting experiment in that sort of approach (though guided
by an editor) called the Free Online Dictionary of Computing
(http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/). People contribute both definitions and
critiques, though a big chunk of the wordlist comes from other sources. I
could imagine, say, a dictionary of
regional terms compiled out of materials people would send to a Web site.

Sara


> 
> Dave
> 
>