Ivana Filipovic Petrovic with ELEXIS visiting grant at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH)

From February 25-March 8, Ivana Filipović Petrović spends two weeks with an ELEXIS visiting grant at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH). As a lexicographer at the Linguistics Research Institute (Zavod za lingvistička istraživanja) of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, for the past ten years, she has been working as part of a team of three lexicographers involved in completing the Croatian Dictionary of the Literary Language. The dictionary’s history goes back to the 1950s when Julije Benešić started with the collection of sources and the building of a corpus of the most important sources of Croatian literature from the 19th century onwards. The Croatian Dictionary of the Literary Language was first published in 1985 with its original title Rječnik hrvatskoga književnoga jezika od preporoda do I.G. Kovačića. Until today, 14 volumes (A-Š) have been published. The aim of the lexicographers at the Croatian Academy of Sciences is to digitise and publish these printed volumes online. Furthermore, an integral corpus, a convenient dictionary writing system and an infrastructure for online publishing should be provided for the work on the future volumes (T, U, V, Z and Ž).

In this context, Ivana has applied for the ELEXIS – European Lexicographic Infrastructure visiting grant. In ELEXIS, 17 partner institutions from 15 countries work together in order to foster cooperation and knowledge exchange between different research communities in lexicography. The ELEXIS trans-national access (TNA) supports researchers and research teams in reaching facilities and lexicographical resources which are not fully accessible online or where a professional on-site expertise is needed to promote knowledge exchange. This access will be facilitated via visit grants. Ivana is one of the winners of the first call. The title of her research project is „(Retro)digitisation and online publication of the Croatian Dictionary of the Literary Language“. The project concerns the plan of (retro)digitisation and online publication of the Croatian Dictionary of the Literary Language, as well as computer processing of the corpus on which this dictionary is based.

Ivana feels very welcome at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities and states that the knowledge she gained during her stay will be helpful for the future work on the Croatian Dictionary of the Literary Language and its online publication.