UCF Awarded Grant for Searchable Editions of Webster’s Dictionaries

University of Central Florida researchers have been awarded nearly $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create searchable digital editions of Noah Webster’s 1806 and 1828 dictionaries. The two-year project, led by English associate professor Beth Young, will transform the historic reference works into annotated online resources for scholars, educators, students and the public while also giving undergraduate and graduate students practical experience in digital editing, proofreading and semantic text tagging.

The effort, titled Noah Webster’s Dictionary Online: Preserving America’s Revolutionary Language Heritage, will be conducted through UCF’s Department of English and Center for Humanities and Digital Research. Young will work with co-principal investigators Brook Miller, the center’s associate director, and Mark Kamrath, a professor of English and the center’s co-director. Postdoctoral fellow Abigail Moreshead will conduct research and supervise the student team, while XML specialist William Dorner will oversee the technical encoding. Susan Xiao, CHDR’s lead programmer, will direct development of the digital platform.

The project builds on the team’s experience with Johnson’s Dictionary Online, an earlier NEH-funded digital humanities initiative. Its planned editions of Webster’s The Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1806, and An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, will go beyond the scanned pages and basic transcriptions found in many existing online versions. The new resources are intended to provide complete transcriptions, high-quality images, scholarly annotations and advanced search functions. The team aims to complete the searchable 1828 edition in time for its 200th anniversary in 2028, followed by the 1806 edition, although the announcement describes this as a project goal rather than a completed result.

By making the entries searchable and structured, the editions are designed to support new forms of linguistic, literary, historical and legal research. Webster’s dictionaries document American English during the nation’s formative period and preserve language encountered in early American law, politics, education and everyday life. The project proposal notes that courts continue to consult dictionaries when interpreting the original meaning of constitutional and legal terms, while teachers use such works to help students understand the language of the founding era. CHDR will host and maintain the platform, which currently contains full-page images and is expected eventually to offer advanced search tools, scholarly annotations and high-resolution entry images.

The project also connects Webster’s dictionaries to the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, an initiative led by Kamrath to identify, transcribe, organize and edit the post-Revolutionary author’s uncollected writings. Because the Brown and Webster materials come from the same period, the project’s leaders see the dictionaries as a bridge for interpreting those texts. Student participation will extend across several academic programs through internships and research opportunities, combining digital humanities training with the careful preparation required to make historical language accessible in a modern research environment. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed through the project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Subject of Research: A digital humanities project to preserve and annotate Noah Webster’s historic American dictionaries.

Article Title: University of Central Florida researchers receive NEH grant to preserve Noah Webster’s dictionaries online

Article References: University of Central Florida researchers receive NEH grant to preserve Noah Webster’s dictionaries online. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

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Keywords: Noah Webster, digital dictionaries, digital humanities, American English, UCF, NEH grant, XML encoding, semantic tagging, scholarly annotation, text digitization, University, Central