Leximancer software driven lexicography for dictionaries in the digital age

Abstract

As we enter the digital age, and dictionaries increasingly take on online and mobile electronic variants, the way dictionaries will be made is bound to change. The management of massive amounts of data that need to be synthesised and compiled into a comprehensive dictionary will benefit from new data mining software called Leximancer. This paper discusses the functional capacities of Leximancer which can mine massive amounts of qualitative data and help the researcher make sense of the textual contents of such data in super-electronic time frames. The software has been used by the author of this paper and other qualitative researchers in pedagogy to investigate the thematic and semantic meaning embedded in large quantities of data but its lexicographic potential is yet to be explored. Drawing upon the realised efficiencies and effectiveness of this software in the above research, this paper suggests that Leximancer appears to offer a lot of promise in facilitating the demanding tasks of lexicography as an interdisciplinary research field.