Emily Dickinson Lexicon
Description
View the completed website.
For my Linguistic Masters Project, I worked with Dr. Cynthia Hallen to converting her work on the Emily Dickinson Lexicon to an electronic format for online publication. The project involved converting Word Perfect documents to text files, and then parsing them into a MySQL database.
Users are able to view the information in the lexicon letter by letter, page by page or access a word directly through basic searches. Users are also invited to register. Once registered, users can access additional features on the website such as user contributions and advanced searches.
User contributions allow users to add missing entries into the lexicon, add new definitions, or edit existing head words and definitions. All user submissions are added to a moderation query for later review by an administrator. Administrators can choose to approve, edit, or reject user submissions. Once approved, the submissions are automatically added to the site and the user added to the credits of the website.
Advanced searches allow users to search through the dictionary using a complex set of wild card characters. Search types available are part of speech, proximity, reference, poem, and user.
The Noah Webster's 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language was also converted from Microfilm to an electronic database format and incorporated into the website. Users can access and search through the dictionary in much the same way as the lexicon.
The site also features powerful administrator controls that allow an administrator not familiar with coding web pages to still manage the site effectively. Administrator options include user controls for banning, emailing, and edit; webpage controls for adding or editing pages; file manager for uploading different file types; lexicon and dictionary managers for managing the information found in those sections; and a contributions manager that allows administrators to approve, edit, or reject user submissions.