A Pilot Historical Thesaurus of Scots

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This project will create a pilot Historical Thesaurus of Scots (HTS), covering the Scots language from the earliest records to the present day. This will be a new resource created out of an existing digital resource, the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL), which was developed with AHRB funding in 2001-4. The HTS will be the first historical thesaurus of Scots and will be planned as a digital resource from the outset. This pilot project will act as proof of concept for a future larger bid for the HTS and will address the following questions: how can the current DSL data be queried and restructured to create a basis for the HTS; what are the essential components for each entry in the HTS and what is the optimal markup scheme; what type of search facilities will the HTS require; how can other complex linguistic datasets, such as the Historical Thesaurus of English, assist the compilation of the HTS and how may these be linked into its eventual output; how can the pilot HTS website incorporate multimedia and user-generated content to create a dynamic and innovative resource? The pilot project is planned to last fifteen months, starting in January 2014. It will focus on selected subject domains which are rich in Scots vocabulary-such as sports and games, food, and weather-in order to produce a working subset of the planned thesaurus which will be made available online by the end of the project.