Odds and Ends

[Grant Barrett]

All the printed matter mentioned would be good--and I would welcome any
of it, as long as the digitizing and OCR (or keying) are done
properly--but I'd say there is much that is currently passing or has
passed that is already digital which is not being or has not been
collected.

For one, there seems to be no ongoing effort to create an IRC or
instant messaging archive (although there have been some corpus
one-offs). For two, there needs to be a concentrated effort to salvage
anything left of BITNET or FIDO archives. For three, the same for BBSes
and the Freenets. Any public call for that data, like Google did for
Google Groups, is bound to turn up some result. For four, there are
thousands of mailing lists which are not currently available in any
sort of universal archive, not even on Google. The body of Yahoo
Groups, for example, are not searchable. Each group is only searchable
separately, meaning you have to sign up as a member to each group, one
at at time. That's not counting the thousands of other lists, which, by
default, do not permit indexing or spidering and so never show up on
Google or other search engines.

That data is out there, it just needs to be amassed.

Two other printed categories to consider: high school yearbooks
(especially those with inscriptions) and pre-internet zines.

Grant Barrett


-- Project Editor, "Historical Dictionary of American Slang," Oxford
University Press
-- Editor, "Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of
American Political Slang" (2004)
-- Editor, Double-Tongued Word Wrester, http://www.doubletongued.org/
-- Webmaster, American Dialect Society, http://www.americandialect.org/

Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
grant.barrett at oup.com
212 726 6142