Five years of ASHDRA:
The AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA) have now reached their fifth year and the 2024 call for proposals is now open.
A review:
Last month, the ASHDRA panel met up in London for one of our regular meetings. As well as planning for the new call for proposals, it was a chance to review how things are going. This included looking back at the proposals we received last year to discuss how well they fitted with the kind of projects we’re looking to fund. In previous years, one of the issues that had come up was over-ambitious proposals – an issue I wrote about here. This year, several of the proposals were essentially requests to fund the development of dictonary resources, but without a strong enough research element to them – I’ve looked into just what we mean by ‘research’ in more detail over on my blog.
A newsletter:
With five years’ worth of projects now under our belts, it felt like a good time to catch up with all the ASHDRA ‘alumni’ there have been so far – a total of eleven projects, completed and on-going. So I put together a newsletter which was sent out to everyone, inviting them to get in touch with their news. I’ll be reformatting that as a blog post soon, including news of two PhDs successfully completed, and one embarked on.
Plans for 2024:
This year, I’ll be speaking about the ASHDRA awards and some of the exciting insights that have come out of ASHDRA projects so far at the IATEFL Conference in Brighton in April – watch out for more news about my session nearer the time. I’m also planning on going along to the Euralex Conference in October in Croatia, for which the Hornby Trust is one of the sponsors. As in previous years, there will be a session at the conference in which ASHDRA researchers present their research. With such an international reach, these will take the form of video presentations which I hope to introduce at the event, possibly along with some form of Q&A (yet to be decided). It’ll also be a chance to meet up with the Hornby speaker, who this year is Kory Stamper, an American lexicographer who I’ve had the pleasure of working with recently and who, I’m sure, will be a great speaker.