A Pilot Historical Thesaurus of Scots (PHiTS)
Principal Investigator: Dr Susan Rennie (Susan.Rennie@glasgow.ac.uk)
The PHiTS project is funded by a grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, under the Digital Transformations theme. Its aim is to create a pilot Historical Thesaurus of Scots (HTS), which will cover the Scots language from the earliest records to the present day, based on the data in the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk).The HTS will be the first thesaurus of Scots to be organised on historical lines and the first comprehensive resource for the Scots language to be arranged according to synonymy and semantic category. It will aid linguists, writers, schools, and the general public study the Scots language, by providing new ways to explore the rich resources of Scots vocabulary. The project is a partnership with Scottish Language Dictionaries (www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk), who are providing the linguistic data for the project.
The pilot project will last fifteen months, from January 2014 to March 2015. It will focus on selected subject domains which are rich in Scots vocabulary - such as sports and games, food, and weather - in order to produce a working subset of the planned thesaurus which will be made available online by the end of the project.