GlobaLex update

Status

The Global Alliance for Lexicography (GlobaLex) is undergoing registration as a non-profit organization in Leiden, the Netherlands by the representatives of its five founding continental lexicography associations who currently serve on the Management Committee (MC), as follows.

  • African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX). Dion Nkomo
  • Asian Association for Lexicography (ASIALEX). Ilan Kernerman, MC Chair
  • Australasian Association for Lexicography (AUSTRALEX). Julia Miller, MC Vice-chair
  • Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA). Edward Finegan
  • European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX). Lars Trap-Jensen

The MC includes also Simon Krek from the European Lexicographic Infrastructure ELEXIS, which hosts and maintains the GlobaLex website and will add the new Elexifinder search tool for lexicographic publications. The members have been holding monthly virtual meetings since mid-2018, with reports posted regularly on the GlobaLex website. Edward Finegan will be replaced in August 2020 by the new DSNA representative, Sarah Ogilvie.

Workshops

Two GlobaLex workshops were canceled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • Globalex Workshop on Linked Lexicography. The third workshop organized in conjunction with the LREC conference series was due to be held in Marseille, France in May. Focusing on cross-linking different lexicographic resources as well as other lexical data, it featured monolingual and bilingual/multilingual shared-task tracks supported by ELEXIS, the TIAD (Translation Inference Across Dictionaries) workshops and K Dictionaries.
  • Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neologism. The second iteration of GWLN was due as part of the Euralex conference in Alexandroupolis, Greece. Selected papers will be published as a special issue of the International Journal of Lexicography in 2021 and others as part of the conference proceedings.

In addition, Globalex Seminar on Learner’s Dictionaries that was planned to be held in this year’s conference of AFRILEX has been rescheduled to 2021.

Conferences

The three conferences of the continental lexicography associations planned in 2020 were rescheduled to 2021, when the biennial Australex and DSNA meetings are scheduled to take place too.

  • DSNA. Boulder, Colorado, June 2-5
  • ASIALEX. Yogyakarta, Indonesia, June 12-14
  • AFRILEX. Stellenbosch, South Africa, June/July
  • AUSTRALEX. New Zealand, September 1-2
  • EURALEX. Alexandroupolis, Greece, September 7-12

The eLex Conference that was planned to be held in Brno, Czech Republic in 2021 may be postponed to 2022.

Publications

Dictionaries. The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America devoted a special issue to papers from the first Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neologism held as part of the DSNA conference at Bloomington, Indiana in May 2019. Volume 41, Issue 1, 2020 includes eight of the 13 papers from GWLN 2019.

Lexicon. The journal of the Iwasaki Linguistic Circle in Tokyo is accessible on the Globalex website starting with Issue 25 from 1995.

Lexicography – Journal of ASIALEX. The publication of LJA is taken over from Springer by Equinox Publishing, from Sheffield, UK. The journal will be published online-only from 2021 in a hybrid open access model combining ASIALEX membership. LJA is now indexed also by Scopus.

Tom McArthur and Globalex

In the end of 1997 and much of 1998, I had the good fortune to collaborate with Tom McArthur on editing Lexicography in Asia. Tom offered to co-edit when I asked for his paper from the Dictionaries in Asia Conference, which he didn’t have but proposed to rewrite as an introduction to the volume. He was kind, bright and visionary – early in developing interest in language radiating into new information science, from his reference science to (linguistic) data science today – and reciprocally and wholeheartedly both local and global.

Earlier in 1997 I wrote that “[a] future Globalex (or Unilex, in the words of Tom McArthur) concerns globalization and co-existence in multilingual societies” (cf. Towards PEOPLEX, KDN 5, 1997). Tom felt uneasy by the possible connotation of the word people in the title. In the introduction to Lexicography in Asia he wrote:

“… it has now become possible to look forward to a conference devoted to ‘world lexicography’ … that will seek to cover as wide a sampling as possible from our immense international heritage of reference materials, in all their formats, genres, rationales, writing systems, technologies, languages of origin, and languages of translation. It would be particularly good if the four continental -lexes and the DSNA could consider jointly sponsoring such a ‘Globalex’ development.”

The wish for Globalex is answered and pursued.

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