On 23 June 2011 a seminar will be held in which the results of the project “Enhancing a Tashelhiyt Berber Dictionary” will be presented. The seminar will take place in the NIAS Lecture Room at 11.00 hours.
Enhancing a Tashelhiyt Berber Dictionary
The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) has been awarded a SURF-foundation grant to produce an “Enhanced Publication” in collaboration with Data Archiving and Network Services (DANS). NIAS selected the Tashelhiyt Berber Dictionary project of Professor Harry Stroomer (Leiden University, The Netherlands) for this award. With 10 million speaker Tashelhiyt Berber is the largest of the nine Berber languages of North Africa, it is spoken mainly in South Morocco and in Moroccan cities such as Casablanca and Rabat. In the research year 2010/11 Professor Stroomer worked at NIAS to finalise an extensive dictionary of this language. A paper version and a network version will be the outcome of this project.
The aim of the grant was to build an internet prototype of selected parts of this dictionary. The grant financed the salaries of a student assistant, Marijn van Putten, who was appointed to help setting up this prototype technically on the basis of the input given by Harry Stroomer. Marijn was greatly supported by experts from SURF-foundation, in particular by John Doove, Leen Breure from Utrecht University, and the experts from DANS, in particular Paula Witkamp. As e-publishing and enhancing publications is a core interest for NIAS as an institution, vital support was given by various NIAS staff members, in particular Gera Pronk and Dindy van Maanen.
We decided to interpret the word “enhancing” as the linking or inclusion of digital data to, in our case, dictionary data. We selected five dictionary entries to which interesting and clarifying digital materials could be linked. The material could be images (pictures and films), audio-files or text-files.
The results of the project will be presented and discussed in a seminar in the NIAS Lecture Room on 23 June 2011 at 11.00 hours.