'Tour de CLARIN: Austria' blog post written by Darja Fišer and Jakob Lenardič
The Viennese Lexicographic Editor has been developed by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and is a standalone XML editing system that is suited for collaborative work on lexicographic data. The tool can be freely downloaded from Clarin Centre Vienna, where updated versions are uploaded regularly. Extensive documentation and a how-to-use guide can be found here.
A powerful and adaptable tool, the Viennese Lexicographic Editor provides a flexible environment for navigating through and working with complexly-annotated dictionary entries. Researchers can use the tool either to directly access the data in XML (figure 1) or to edit them by means of an easy-to-use graphical database interface (figure 2). Furthermore, the tool offers different ways to visualise the data and checks their well-formedness whenever researchers save their entries. Through a special module, the Viennese Lexicographic Editor allows its users to access and integrate external language resources such as corpora and other dictionaries.
The Viennese Lexicographic Editor has established quite the tradition since it was first used within a glossary-building student project. It has been used as the key piece of software for the compilation of electronic dictionaries, such as the TUNICO Dictionary, within the international Viennese Corpus of Arabic Varieties and the Linguistic dynamics in the Greater Tunis Area projects. In turn, these dictionaries, which are freely available through the DictGate platform, have served as an important resource for comparative dialectological research of language varieties and have been used in language teaching courses, thereby facilitating a cooperative approach to lexicography and lexicology within the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.
Figure 1: XML view
Figure 2: database view
Click here to read more about Tour de CLARIN