I was able to encourage the participants this morning about their work
on Thursday, and they set off to begin word collection in good spirits. They
made good headway again today, finishing the week with just over 7,000 words
collected.
On a more discouraging note, it seems that there are some problems with
a few of the groups. One group is zipping through the semantic domains so
quickly that they are missing a lot of obvious words. The typists then have to
take the time to add these words to the lists themselves before actually typing
them, which slows down their part of the work. Two other groups spent a lot of
time writing down phrases that are not useful and which had to be crossed out.
I’ll be giving a bit of an explanation again on Monday morning about the
difference between idiomatic expressions (which should be included in a
dictionary) and descriptive phrases (which have no place in a dictionary). The
silver lining on this “cloud” is, of course, the fact that we’re collecting so
much valid material for the dictionary in spite of the problems.
I continue to function as a typist, helping as much as I can.
Everything I type has to be checked beforehand by Matthieu, however, and he
only has so many hours in the day. There is quite a backlog of material waiting
to be typed, and at this point, it’s looking like we’ll be dealing with that
during the cleanup week instead of being able to focus on cleaning up the data
that we’ve collected. But maybe we’ll be able to complete it the first couple
of days that week and still have some time for me to teach those who will be
continuing work on the dictionary about how to do that.
On the “home” front, I enjoyed a hot shower again this morning and got
my laundry done during the day while I was gone. Tomorrow I hope to be able to
get my hair trimmed, as it’s getting rather bushy around my ears and on the
back of my neck.
No comments:
Post a Comment