Dr. Gary A. Tubb and Dr. James Nye Spearheading Major Expansion of Digital Dictionaries

In 1999, the University of Chicago started the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA), a program that makes electronic dictionaries of South Asian languages available to the public for free. The DDSA includes languages from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Gary Tubb, Professor and Chair of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC), and James Nye, former UChicago Library Southern Asia bibliographer and COSAS Emeritus, have been awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that will allow them to expand these digital dictionaries.

The project is set to take three years with the goals of improving pronunciation content, adding new languages to the database, and making it easier to circulate existing online dictionaries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has limited the ability to conduct in-person research in libraries, offices, and archives, the expansion of these digital dictionaries is more important now than ever for researchers. The DDSA includes 52 dictionaries with more than seven million searches each year. One of the key goals of this project is to improve the search functionality of the DDSA which involves complex technology. Dr. Tubb and Dr. Nye believe this expansion is crucial right now as digital resources are here to stay.

You can find more information on this project from UChicago News: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/uchicago-scholars-expand-digital-dictionaries-south-asia-middle-east