Congratulations to Dr Mark Faulkner, Ussher Associate Professor of Medieval Literature, and Dr Elisabetta Magnanti, Visiting Research Fellow in the School of English, on the award of a Partnership Development Grant worth C$200,000 (c. €125,000) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

The grant will build a partnership between their Ansund project, which is using Machine Learning to build a new exhaustive open-access corpus of Old English, and the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), based in Toronto, which has been working on a comprehensive Dictionary of Old English for over 50 years. This is the first time the DOE has partnered with an external organisation. 

The project, Data Engineering for Old English (DeFOE) has three principal objectives: the computational optimisation of Dictionary of Old English workflows; a new edition of the ‘List of Old English Texts’, first published in 1973; and a new universal, interoperable data architecture for Old English. It will also organise a conference on computational approaches to Old English in Toronto in 2029, on the 60th anniversary of the ‘Computers and Old English Concordances’ conference held in Toronto in 1969. 

The funding has supported the recruitment of a three-year postdoc, Dr Kyle Smith,  based at the Dictionary of Old English, but who will spend two months in Dublin in Spring 2027 to receive training in relevant computational methods from Faulkner, Magnanti and their team.