Developing Integrated Editions of Minority Language Dictionaries: The Irish Example

The Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT) project at University College Cork is an on-line corpus of multilingual texts that are encoded in TEI conformant SGML/XML. As of September 2006, the corpus has 9.3 million words online. Over the last five years, doctoral work carried out at the project has focused on the development of lexicographical resources spanning the years c. AD 700-1700, and on the development of tools to integrate the corpus with these resources. This research has been further complimented by the Linking Dictionaries and Text project, a North-South Ireland collaboration between the University of Ulster, Coleraine, and University College Cork. The Linking Dictionaries and Text project will reach completion in October 2006. This article focuses on CELT's latest research project, the Digital Dinneen project, that aims to create an integrated edition of Patrick S. Dinneen's Focldir Gaedhilge agus Bearla (Irish-English Dictionary). In this article, the newly developed research infrastructure-that is the culmination of the doctoral research carried out at CELT and the Linking Dictionaries and Text collaboration-will be described, and ways that the Digital Dinneen will be integrated into this infrastructure established. Finally, avenues of future research will be pointed to.