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Wordie Action Alert: Dictionary of American Regional English

The Dictionary of American Regional English is one of the great American scholarly achievements, all four volumes of the planned six volume work having earned endless praise.

I’m looking forward to writing at greater length about DARE one of these days. But poking around on their web site* this evening, I found something that might be of immediate interest, especially to the Americans in the house.

DARE is looking for citations. Anyone from North Carolina know what a “tally-lagger” is? Nantucketers familiar with the term “slatch,” or New Englanders with “sleighty?” The wanted list has a slew of great words on it, all beginning with S or T, all orphans looking for citations. I can’t provide a direct link, sadly, because their site uses frames, but you can find it by going to their main page and clicking on ‘QUERIES’ in the left-hand column.

This reminds me, Jesse Sheidlower still seems to be collecting sci-fi citations, judging from the latest entry on his Science Fiction Citation site, dated January 7, 2008.

If anyone knows of any other dictionaries with open calls for citations, please mention them in the comments.

* They’ve got a lot of interesting content on their site, but it would be wonderful if the dictionary itself was available online. If anyone from the Gates Foundation or the like is listening, this would be a wonderful way to spend some of your filthy lucre.

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NYTimes is to Kindle as Gillette is to Razor

Today, much like Dr. Hfuhruhurr performing two screw-top brain surgeries at once, I grind two of my favorite axes: The New York Times and Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader.

The Kindle, which is apparently selling better than I thought it would, can receive nine major news publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde, and, of course, The New York Times.

You’d think the news outlets would view this growing platform as an ideal opportunity to expand their reach, given their shrinking print readership. And you’d think that the Times in particular, having recently eliminated TimesSelect in a bid for scale, would be doing everything possible to leverage the popularity of the Kindle and subsequent devices.

You’d think, but you’d be wrong. You have to pay $14 per month to read the Times on a Kindle. Less than it costs in print, true, but $14 more than reading it on the web. It’s another sign that the NYTimes Company is conflicted at best, at war with itself at worst.

The future of news is digital, different rules apply to digital content, and those are the rules they should be playing by. And the first rule is that in a world governed by an overabundance of information, value flows in different directions. The attention information garners is more valuable than the information itself. Of course the two are related, but in addition to traditional attributes like quality content and a trusted brand (which still hold), easy, free, ubiquitous access becomes vital.

There are historical antecedents for reduced cost and increased access changing the media landscape. As Daniel Czitrom has pointed out, the introduction of the penny newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century, facilitated by the invention of the steam press, completely changed journalism. Reduced cost and increased access essentially created the Times in 1851, and those are the forces they should be paying attention to now.

Transitioning to a new model is painful, and it’s understandable that the Times would want to milk the old one as long as possible. It also makes sense that they’d have different strategies in effect in different places during a period of transition. But they let this go on too long at their own peril. Once a disruptive technology passes a certain threshold, to not embrace it fully means to go down with the ship. It’s time for the NYTimes Company to suck it up and move, across the board, to business models that are growing, rather than contracting.

At the very least they should be the cheapest news site available on the Kindle, rather than the most expensive. Free would be better. But why not take a page from Gillette and subsidize the cost of the Kindle, the way Gillette sells razors below cost and makes it up on the blades? Sell a Times-branded Kindle, with the Times set as the permanent default newspaper (they could make the thing less ugly while they’re at it). There’s an antecedent here, too: at one point Bloomberg Radio gave away thousands of cheap little radios, which could only tune in Bloomberg’s channel, WBBR.

If the Kindle really is doing well, it may herald a new platform, and the Times should ride that wave, rather than get swamped by it. It may be one of the ingredients that helps them hit the scale of which they’re capable, and which can lift them from their doldrums.

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Visualizing the English Language

On the heels of yesterday’s image search post here’s another item connecting words and images, this one from researchers at MIT*. These guys have produced a “visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning**.” I had thought the English language looked like a large, disturbing bunny, but aparently it looks like an enormous mosaic of tiny colored blobs.

From their intro: “large-scale groupings correspond to broad categories such as plants or people.” Which lets us discover interesting trends, like that plants are green. That green blob at the bottom, floating around like Australia? Plants.

Then there’s this: “each tile [is] the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob.” I clicked on dozens of tiles, and the average image was always a colored blob. This strikes me as analogous to taking all the synonyms for the word “person,” grinding them through an averaging algorithm, and claiming the average word for “person” is “aoviksv”. Which is to say, some things don’t make much sense, averaged.

So this is pretty useless, even by my low standards of what constitutes utility. What it really appears to be is an eye-candy outcropping of a larger, more meaningful research effort–machine recognition of objects in images. And who knows, maybe some fancy algorithm can make better sense of “aoviksv” than our tiny little brains.

Let me insert my standard caveat to digs at academia: what the hell do I know. These guys represent MIT. Errata represents… New Jersey. If that.

* Via ReadWriteWeb, via Tech_Space.
** The source of their semantic meanings? WeirdNet, natch. Everybody love the WeirdNet.

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Wordie Image Search

There is now an ‘image search’ link under each word, which when clicked performs a Yahoo! image search and displays the results inline. On your profile you can set Wordie to do this automatically, obviating the need for the click.

Or if you prefer to kick it old school, you can turn it off entirely. Click on ‘you’, then ‘edit personal preferences’, and you’ll see radio buttons that let you set image search to automatic, on demand, or not there at all.

One of Wordie’s charms, I’m told, is the emphasis on text über alles, so I made this optional and tried to keep it subtle. But it’s worth playing with, even if you are a textist. Yahoo! image search can be almost WeirdNetian in what it comes up with for more abstract terms, and for quotidian words it’s an excellent image browser. Especially, if I may say, when married to Wordie.

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Dictionary of Newfie English

Continuing our peripatetic exploration of odd online regional dictionaries, I present to you the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.

Originally published in 1982 by the University of Toronto Press, it was put online by Memorial University in 1999. The quality of both the site and the dictionary are excellent, and with over 5500 richly-cited entries it’s a goldmine of Canadiana. My only complaint is that the entries are framed, making it a headache to link directly to words (though there is a decent search engine).

Some gems I’d not previously heard: queak (the “gentle squeak of the young of small animals”) and tayscaun (“a small amount of anything).

Discovered via the intriguing REDEFiNE iT.

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The New York Times Should Be a Social Network

The New York Times web site has gotten much better in the past year, but that hasn’t stopped their stock price from sinking like they have rocks in their pockets. And the sale of the Wall Street Journal shows that family ownership is no bulwark against predatory forces.

To survive in recognizable form the Times needs to accelerate their transition from a newspaper company to an information company. They need to find a sustainable business model before someone buys them and either remakes the company in their own image, or bleeds it dry.

One important step they should take: become a social network.

Social networks benefit from an organizing principle. MySpace sprang from the natural aggregators of bands and music, Facebook from academic communities. News as an organizing principle is potentially larger and stickier than either of those, and has the potential to foster a more engaged, less inane community, a social network for adults. In the real world the Times already facilitates social networking: people talk about what’s in the news, and they especially talk about what’s in the Times.

There has been an enormous amount of me-too bandwagoneering around social networks, but in the case of the Times this move makes strategic sense, and can be accomplished gracefully and incrementally. First, allow users to create public profiles, tied to their comments and other site activities. Allow comments on news stories as well as blog posts. Let readers vote up good comments, à la Amazon (and USA Today). Let readers create and join interest groups, and talk to each other.

In practice the Times would be a confederacy of networks. The people talking about books on Paper Cuts and about parenting on Judith Warner’s blog would not be the same polemicists attacking each other on the op-ed pages. This is a good thing. With the depth of content on the Times, there’s something for everyone.

Two things they should not change: the requirement that commenters register, and editorial oversight of comments. The air of gravitas that hangs over the Times is a feature, not a bug, and high standards are and should remain a positive differentiator.

How does journalism fit into this? As it always has: professional journalism should remain the heart of the Times endeavor. But creating an ecology of engaged readers around the professional content could significantly extend the Times reach, raise traffic levels, and create the possibility for significant new revenue streams. A social networking strategy works hand in hand with the Times historic mission of democratizing information, and it would dovetail nicely with recent experiments like My Times.

Other changes that should accompany this shift:

  • Nix mandatory registration. The slight benefit it offers (to advertisers; it doesn’t benefit readers at all) is far outweighed by the downsides. Create an engaging network and people will register on their own.
  • Get people who have led successful Internet companies on the board and in senior management. See my previous post on Marc Andreessen’s piece (which is what got me thinking about all this in the first place).
  • Enter the local news arena. Partner with the likes of Outside.in, EveryBlock, or my employer, Curbed.com. The web excels at local and neighborhood information, and there are ad dollars to be had. Again this would work nicely with My Times.
  • Seriously improve search. Partner with Google.

Right now NYTimes.com traffic is dwarfed by MySpace and Facebook. The Times has national and international reach, fantastic content, and an incredible brand. It can and should be one of the most popular sites on the web, rather than the 201st, which is where Alexa ranks it today.

There is a way out of the morass of the past year, and social networking, with the benefits it would bring to both readers and the company, is one step towards it.

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Judge Selya, we salute you

If Wordie is ever sued (for libel?), I hope it’s in Judge Bruce Selya’s court. When he throws the book at you, it’s a dictionary.

Frederick Brodie had a lovely bit in last week’s National Law Journal (found via Dan Slater’s post in the WSJ Law Blog) about the linguistic proclivities of the good judge, which seem so straight-up Wordie that I had to turn them into a list. Selya loves ten-cent words (Law Blog, adjusting for inflation, calls them five-dollar words), and has managed to work doozies like philotheoparoptesism, repastinate, sockdolager, and thaumaturgical, among others, into his opinions.

Not exactly plain English, and I can’t help but wonder if a more straightforward style would also be more democratic. But c’mon, sockdolager? Makes me smile.