Purpose and Scope

This site was initially created in 2001 to support the preparation of a substantially revised and greatly expanded edition of the Anglo Norman Dictionary, whose first edition was published between 1977 and 1992 by the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). Access to significant new materials (see Introduction to the Electronic Edition of the AND on this site) meant that the desirability of revising the earlier fascicles of the Dictionary had become apparent even before the later ones had gone to press, and during the years 1989 to 1998 the editors benefited from the material support of the MHRA in this undertaking, which they gratefully acknowledge.

An award by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research Council) of £108,894 over two years (March 2002-February 2004) under the Resource Enhancement Scheme allowed letters A-E of the revised edition to be digitised and mounted on this site, along with a selection of scholarly articles on Anglo-Norman topics and some of the source texts on which the Dictionary is based. 

A further AHRC award, a Major Research Grant of £426,112 for the period September 2003-August 2007, enabled the editors to appoint two full-time postdoctoral researchers to the AND team to work with them on the revision and expansion of letters F-H of the dictionary, which have since been published on this site, as outlined below. A PhD studentship related to the dictionary source materials was also provided for under this grant, though unfortunately no suitable candidate eligible for support under the award's prior residence conditions could be found. This side of the operations is located at Aberystwyth University within the Department of European Languages.

A third AHRC grant of £309,444 for the period April 2004 to April 2007, funded the digitisation and electronic re-publication of letters F-Z of the First Edition of the AND, allowing the on-line AND2 entries to be supplemented by the AND1 versions of letters not yet revised (this sub-project was completed and the outcome placed on-line in March 2006), together with the continuation and expansion of digitisation work on Anglo-Norman source documents and scholarly articles on A-N lexis. An enlarged budget allowed additional text capture by rekeying and OCR, and the employment of two (FTE) encoding assistants to add the XML markup required to make many more of the sources fully accessible both to the dictionary editors and to scholars and students throughout the world. This work, centered on the Department of French at Swansea University, is now substantially complete and the expanded textbase was opened to public access on this site in July 2007.

This site, and the digital version of the AND which it houses, will be the primary location for publishing the outcomes of a fourth AHRC-funded project located at the Aberystwyth Department of European Languages, begun in early 2007. This project, further details of which are available on a separate page, is to investigate Anglo-Norman lexis in unpublished documents in the UK National Archives.

The success of the previous funded phases in meeting their objectives on schedule, and the extremely positive response of the international user community to both the print version of the revised Dictionary and this on-line resource were recognised by the award of a fifth tranche of AHRC funding of £874,000 for the period September 2007 to August 2012. This is funding the continued employment of two post-doctoral Assistant Editors to carry out the revision and on-line publication of letters I to M as well as the continuing detailed review and revision of entries already on line in the light of ongoing research. Provision is also made within the funding for exchange visits of experts engaged in cognate undertakings and further development of the project's document management and delivery system.

 
Dictionary Progress

The revision of letters A-E was completed in 2004, and the print version of AND2 A-E may now be ordered from the publishers. Revised letters A-E were placed on free public access on this site on March 1 2006, accompanied by revised letter F (published in digital form only) and a digitised version of AND1 letters G-Z, marking the successful completion of this major phase in the project, involving all three funding strands. A-E digitisation was actually completed during the first tranche of Resource Enhancement funding, but the outcome could not be made generally available until publication of the print edition. The digitisation of AND1 G-Z, similarly previously under restricted access until the print edition of AND2 A-E was released, represents one main deliverable of the Phase 2 Resource Enhancement Scheme project, while the completed revision of the entries for F, G and, most recently, H are further significant deliverables of the Major Research Grant.

The AND2 entries for letters A, B, C, D and E (around 10,600 substantive entries altogether, with a similar number of cross-reference headwords) were the first to be marked-up and on-line. The conversion of these entries from Microsoft Word documents to full XML markup based on the TEI P4 Guidelines for Print Dictionaries, and their integration into a structure-aware XML indexing and retrieval system that covers dictionary sources and scholarly articles, was completed in July 2003 (though there were subsequent minor changes and additions to the data as a result of the main review process for the A-E entries) marking a major milestone in the project.

August 2004 brought the first milestone in Phase 2 of the dictionary digitisation project, with the completed conversion of the entries for letter V of AND1 from their original Word format to the same TEI-conformant XML markup employed for the revised A-E. By July 2005, letters P-Z from AND1 (the last three fascicles of the print edition) were completely digitised and on-line, adding 7,000 substantive entries to those of AND2. Letters L, M, N, O and U from AND1 (2000+ substantive entries) were added in December 2005. The final milestone the AND1 digitisation was passed early in February 2006, when letters G, H, I, J, and K of AND1, around 1,400 substantive entries, were placed on line alongside the rest.

The new AND2 F entries, representing the first tranche of work by the expanded editorial team under the AHRC-funded revision of letters F-H, were placed on line in finally revised form in mid February 2006, at which point the creation of a full digitised dictionary was complete. At present, no separate print publication of the revised material from F onwards is planned: revised entries after E will be published in electronic form only on this site.

The substantive editing work on the new AND2 G entries, just under 1,000 in number, was completed in September 2006, and after a final review, these AND2 G entries replaced the AND1 entries for that letter on this site in December 2006, thus passing the penultimate milestone of the F-H revision project according to schedule.

The creation and internal review of the AND2 H entries comprising around 700 substantive entries, containing over 3,000 citations and 1,500 English glosses, was finished in April 2007. After external review, the AND2 H entries were published on this site in September 20007, completing this phase of the project, which has delivered all its output on schedule exactly as specified in the funding bid. Work now continues with the I-M revision and publication phase.

Whereas the A-E entries of AND2 (and the whole of AND1) were originally created in Microsoft Word format and therefore required complex specialised processing and substantial post-editing to convert them to TEI-conformant XML, the AND2 entries from F onwards are being prepared in XML by the editorial team themselves, so that no conversion process is necessary before they can be digitally published. This means that the editorial staff of the project are able to compile, edit, revise and publish entries in final electronic form without any dependence on technical staff or external agencies to apply markup or process the files prior to publication.

The citations (roughly 115,000 in number) contained in the approximately 23,000 full entries are electronically indexed and fully searchable, capable of serving as a mini-corpus of Anglo-Norman usage in their own right. Since March 2005 users have also had access to an on-line concordance of forms found in the citations, which in its latest version supports wordlist generation via regular expressions. The English translations and glosses within the entries (totalling about 66,000) are similarly indexed and searchable, providing a means of using the dictionary in the "reverse" direction (English => Anglo-Norman), as well as easy access to entire semantic fields not readily available in a print publication.

List of Texts

The List of Texts cited in the Dictionary was placed on-line at the end of June 2003 and has been regularly revised to reflect the results of checking it against the references in the citations themselves. Apart from its obvious bibliographical function, this item further enhances the power of the on-line version. Both the print and the digital versions of this list give for each source the corresponding siglum (where available) from the "industry standard" Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français. But the digital version additionally allows users to look up the entry for each such siglum in the DEAF's on-line Complément bibliographique. This is achieved by using the AND's search engine to access the DEAF data, something which is made possible (and indeed easy) because both projects use XML markup. Also, the bibliographical particulars of each text in the list contain a link that allows all citations from that source to be summoned up on screen (and then, from that list of citations, the entries where they are located can be accessed directly). Conversely, by double-clicking on the siglum after any citation when browsing the normal dictionary display, the full particulars of that item can be brought up on screen. 

Textbase

Close to 100 source texts, including their full variant apparatus where appropriate, have been digitised in the now-concluded Resource Enhancement programmes. Seventy-six texts, containing upwards of 5 million tokens, covering all periods and registers of Anglo-Norman usage, are now fully searchable and accessible on this site. The remainder of the sources digitised but not yet electronically re-published here will be added to the on-line texbase during the remainder of 2007, as various remaining technical and copyright issues are resolved, bringing the token count to around 7 million.

Among the forthcoming items is a fully-searchable XML-based version of W. Rothwell's new critical edition of Femina (Trinity College Cambridge, MS. B.14.40), the project's first text to be edited from MS source for original publication on this site (which in the interim can be downloaded as a pdf document). W. Rothwell is now editing "plain text" versions of the other Bibbesworth manuscripts, which will be made available here along with Femina as a combined searchable resource later in 2007

Site Address

The project is housed on four interconnected servers: two on campus locations at Aberystwyth and Swansea, the other two in private sector facilities in Karlsruhe and Leeds. All production servers carry the same content and facilities, but from time to time one or the other needs to be taken off-line. Such alterations to production servers do not affect users, provided the generic url http://www.anglo-norman.net is used to access the site.

It is important always to use this generic url  to enter the site, and not to use any bookmark, shortcut or other form of stored link that instead names a specific numbered server (such as www5.anglo-norman.net). The generic url  ensures the user will  always be connected to a current production server, even if one or more of the specific servers is off-line.  We would especially ask those who create or administer "link lists" or resource catalogues to bear this in mind if they wish to offer a link to this site.