Emily Dickinson Lexicon — Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments and List of Contributors

As a collaborative endeavor, the Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL) follows the model of past dictionary projects that relied upon the participation of amanuenses, apprentices, assistants, patrons, relatives, scribes, and sponsors. Such projects include Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, Alexander Schmidt's 1902 Shakespeare Lexicon, James A. H. Murray’s 1928 Oxford English Dictionary, and Calvert Watkins’ 1985 American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. The EDL likewise owes thanks to a team of students, scholars, organizations, and institutions, who have provided entries, insights, revisions, suggestions, and support for the dictionary. The names of EDL contributors appear below in alphabetical order by surname, as an expression of gratitude for all service rendered to the EDL project. Click on the letter of the alphabet list to see the names. If you are an EDL contributor whose name is not on the list, please email the chief editor at cynthia_hallen@byu.edu. Please email also to change or delete a name if you see an error.

Fifteen students spontaneously volunteered to work on the EDL after hearing about the project in History of the English Language classes during the 1992-1993 school year at Brigham Young University. Since that time, more than 400 students have contributed to the project as apprentice lexicographers, most as undergraduate volunteers, but some as paid research assistants, both graduate and undergraduate. The apprenticeships included analysis in etymology, grammar, morphology, poetics, pragmatics, semantics, stylistics, and syntax. Students gained hands-on experience in applied linguistics as they dealt with allusion, ambiguity, definition, ellipsis, metaphor, onomastics, reference, synonymy, figurative language, idiomatic expressions, word order variations, and part-of-speech shifts in Dickinson’s poems. Students acquired and more often provided computer expertise in dictionary, concordance, and word-processing programs. Thanks are due to all of the students who became EDL lexicographers.

The Emily Dickinson Lexicon also owes thanks to several Dickinson scholars who have served as advocates, critics, donors, reviewers, writers, and advisory board members for the dictionary. Deep appreciation is due to members and officers of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) for presentation and publication opportunities related to the progress of the EDL. Several EDL scholar contributors merit special mention: Paul Black (creator of the 1995 emweb listserv); Jack Capps (author of Emily Dickinson’s Reading); James Fraser (EDIS and EDL donor); Margaret Freeman (EDIS founder); Cristanne Miller (reviewer of an early EDL book proposal for Greenwood Press); Dorothy Huff Oberhaus (EDL advisory board member); Georgiana Strickland (EDIS Bulletin editor); Hiroko Uno (EDL contributor and international advisor); Mel Thorne (who suggested the EDL website edition); Monte Shelley and Jim Rosenval (co-creators of the WordCruncher concordance tool); as well as many others. I am indebted to Dr. Richard Benvenuto for inspiring my doctoral dissertation on Philology as Rhetoric in Emily Dickinson’s Poems.

The EDL website has received the Albert J. Colton Fellowship for Projects of National or International Scope from the Utah Humanities Council. Gratitude for institutional support is due to Brigham Young University, including the English Department, the Department of Linguistics & English Language, the College of Humanities, the Humanities Publication Center, the Honors Program, the Harold B. Lee Library, the Office of Copyright Licensing, the Kennedy Center for International Studies, and the Office for Research and Creative Activity. In addition, the EDL project is grateful to Harvard University Press for granting permission to use poem numbers and brief citations from the Johnson and Franklin editions of Emily Dickinson’s collected poems and letters. In 1999, former student Sidney Parent commissioned the "Emily Poem" watercolor by H.L. (Hanna Lindberg) that appears as the visual logo for the EDL website. In 2001, former student Jennifer Shakespear Compton created a preliminary EDL website to fulfill an assignment for a course in Computing in the Humanities. Finally, we acknowledge the providential role of web designer Russell Ahlstrom in the creation of this online edition of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon.

The EDL would not have been possible without the people who introduced me to languages, linguistics, literature, poetry, rhetoric, and translation. The EDL is dedicated to those professors, mentors, teachers, relatives, and friends, especially to my honorary father Arthur Henry King, who taught me the words for my calling: lexicography and philology.

Cynthia L. Hallen, April 2007