The OED's Artist in Residence

For the academic year 2003-04 the OED has for the first time an Artist in Residence, Abigail Reynolds. Up until the summer of 2004 Abigail is planning to spend two days per week in the OED offices, talking to members of the Dictionary staff, and developing her ideas. She is no stranger to taking an innovative approach to data: her acclaimed work Mount Fear South London takes the figures for knife crime in an area of London and translates them into the topography of a mountain range, sculpted in cardboard and rising over head height. During the autumn of 2003 it was installed in the Oxford offices of OUP, outside the staff restaurant, where it proved a very lively stimulus for lunchtime conversation. For her work with the OED Abigail is interested in reflecting the Dictionary as a changing and developing resource which is the result of a huge amount of research by individuals, rather than as a fixed authority. The results should be exciting, and it is planned that the project will culminate in an exhibition in October 2004. It is also hoped to have a linked series of speaker meetings during the year.

Abigail read English at Oxford and subsequently completed an MA in fine art at Goldsmiths' College, London. She lives and works in London, and lectures at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Her time with the OED is being funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In October she discussed her work and ideas with the OED's Principal Etymologist, Philip Durkin.

PD: Abigail, I know that some years ago you did some work for the Dictionary, verifying quotations in early printed books, so you definitely have a feel already for the way that OED work tends to involve precise detail in dealing with sometimes very out-of-the-way sources. Was that what initially put you in mind of the OED for a residency?

AR: Yes, that was in 1996 — when I thought of myself as an English Literature graduate rather than a visual artist. The experience of trawling pre-1530s manuscripts for an elusive first citation made a deep impression on me. Without that personal experience I'd still think of the Dictionary as a book rather than the enormous living research project that it is. Maybe the only way to change that common perception would be to re-brand as ‘the Dictionary project’! The most compelling aspect of the OED for me is that it is so excessive. A concise dictionary is meant to be useful to the general current reader, but the OED is in a sense very impractical, because it's so excessive.

PD: So far we've had just a couple of weeks of the OED residency, but I'm aware that in that time you've already had some very interesting and stimulating conversations with various members of the OED team. What in particular stands out from the dialogue that you've had so far?

AR: People from every area of the dictionary have very generously been explaining the structure of the revision process and their personal enthusiasms to me. To give a very concrete example; your lexicographical colleague Jeremy Marshall has a background in zoology, so I asked him to take me through the taxonomy of a single entry. It took us three hours to thrash out the logic of the entry for lime and by extrapolation the organizing principles of the Dictionary which create a very elastic but accessible structure. Of course the OED doesn't have to be organized in the way it is. Any structuring principle will make some aspects of language more visible than others.

To continue the zoological metaphor, there are 300,000 known species of beetle. Most readers will recognize only a handful of beetles but the Natural History Museum records each one and arranges them in meaningful patterns, showing how they came to take the form that they do through generations of slight modifications. This process of evolution is analogous to the historical data for each word. Establishing the phylogeny of beetles, as with all species, is problematic. Superficial similarities can mask completely divergent ancestry. Zoological classification is therefore constantly being reappraised — rather like the current revision of the OED corpus; revising the etymology of a word can reveal hidden links between superficially similar words.

PD: That really strikes a chord with me, because just recently I've been working on a cluster of words whose historical relationships with one another only partially line up with their semantic relationships in modern English. Ordain, ordination, ordinance, and ordnance are all related etymologically, in a way which becomes fairly obvious when you look at their history, but if you don't know that history you probably wouldn't imagine that there was any relationship between the name of an Ordnance Survey map and the the verb ordain.

The Dictionary puts all of these words into (fairly arbitrary but simple) alphabetical order, according to how they are spelt today, and tells you what they mean today, but it also tells you how each word was spelt in the past, and how its range of meanings has changed and developed over time. In addition, in the etymology you are able to trace each word back to French and beyond to Latin, and you are also able to see which senses in English have models or parallels in these languages, and which ones are new to English. When you do this, really interesting patterns emerge, and you see that (summarizing wildly) ordnance ‘artillery’ is originally just a sense development (interestingly confined to English) of ordinance, but this has come to be associated with a particular variant form of ordinance with the middle vowel elided, and which in course of time has come to be perceived as an entirely separate word, with no obvious relationship to ordinance or to ordain, ordination, etc., unless you happen to know the history.

All of this is there in the Dictionary waiting to be pieced together, and in the new edition we're certainly doing as much as we can to present it as clearly and simply as we can, but beyond a certain point we have to leave it to readers to trace the connections between words for themselves, which is why I find it so exciting that you are having the chance to look at all of these questions from a new perspective.

AR: These re-structurings are really interesting because the way in which a word is categorized dictates its use and therefore actually changes it in practice. Linguistic mutations are happening all the time, to the extent where one might think it absolutely futile for the OED to attempt to map language at all, a task as doomed as an attempt to record and categorize all snowflakes (which, fabulously enough, is underway).

PD: Finally, I know that it is really early days as yet, but how do you see the results of this project turning out?

AR: The Leverhulme Trust funding focuses on the process of thinking and doing rather than on a specific end result, but I could illustrate my working methods with a current work, Mount Fear. Here a form has been generated from pure information. It's simply a rendering of a huge number of complex events and information provided by the police. The model could be used as an effective tool in working out how to get across London at minimal risk, but really it functions as an imaginative space. I like to work with the way experiences are structured — as the structure implies a way of seeing also mapping and recording something factual.

I'd like the residency to be a catalyst for dialogue, bringing together different disciplines and ways of thinking about and representing the world we inhabit in all its many aspects. What's really exceptional about visual art is that it's a very undisciplined discipline. It really can exceptionally transgress boundaries, not only in what it can speak about, but what things it can bring together and what form it can take. Of course Art does have a very focused type of discourse, but it has the potential to be very disruptive. Part of my residency will be to bring together speakers from different areas with some of the lexicographers here to bring out different facets of the OED's work that are relevant to very contemporary issues.

For more information about Abigail Reynolds and her work see her web page at: http://abigailreynolds.com/