Modern Languages

The SOAS Wa Dictionary Project is a three-year effort (2003-2006), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board to produce a high-quality dictionary, translating Wa into Chinese, Burmese/Myanmar and English. The project uses advanced techniques in corpus-based lexicography, centred on a database and Internet resource, which will also be suitable for other languages spoken in Burma/Myanmar besides Wa after the life of the project.
Aims and Objectives

The academic objectives of this project are

The project aimed to develope and evaluate portable and transparent methods and tools based on SGML/XML for managing complex document collections. As a test case we examined patterns of co-operation and disagreement between people as expressed in legal documents of the 18th century from southern Corsica concerning rights over property. Our approach aimed to relate coding, modelling, interpretation and catalogue entries with the source material, resulting in a layered representation that includes references to as much of the research context as possible.

The Historical Thesaurus of English is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages. It includes almost the entire recorded vocabulary of English from Old English to the modern period, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary and dictionaries of Old English. The distinctive, semantically-structured hierarchy of the HTE data allows scholars access to material in a uniquely flexible manner, making it an invaluable resource to historians and linguists in particular.

The aim of this project is to investigate how and why reading as an individual and social practice has changed over the period 1450 to 1945, in terms of who readers were; how they accessed reading material; what, where, and how they read; and how they responded to what they read. Supported by funding from AHRC and from The Open University, the central achievement of the project to date has been the establishment of The Reading Experience Database (RED) at The Open University.