The electronic media offers completely different possibilities of making dictionaries comparing to a book form. Beside wider accessibility of the dictionary all around the world, easier searching for dictionary words and the possibility of adding and updating the entries, the use of media influences the ability of interaction and displaying the details of the dictionary composition on demand, enables interconnections of the lexemes and, by using multimedia, offers clearer description of the dictionary composition.
Thus, as a part of the students’ interdisciplinary project, a group of linguists, computer programmers and graphic designers have designed a thematic dialect dictionary with the emphasis on the interactivity, advanced user experience, and aesthetic graphical identity. The dictionary containing expressions from semantic field 'old tools' in one of the Slovene Dolenjska dialect speeches, uses the possibilities of an interactive web application in the structure of the dictionary composition, and in addition to the classical structure, it contains several additional components and/or sections. In the framework of the illustrative material there are images, audio and video recordings with transcribed transcriptions and translations into literary Slovene, while in the dictionary composition there are sections with optional inter-lexeme links to new dictionary compositions: in addition to possible synonyms and etiological explanations of lesser-known words, links to words with the same word root, and to words that form narrow themes (i.e. components of a tool, tools for its maintenance or types of a particular tool).
The design was user-centred and with the design of graphic identity we have reached an open solution that could offer the possibilities of further content and functionality extensions. An efficient visual and interactive communication was obtained through a graphical language, inspired by the phenomena of aging and eternity. Colour pallet includes natural colours, different saturation values of grey and brown, while the texture of the main page was designed as an aged paper, expressing the effect of time changes on a physical world. On the other hand, the preservation value of the dictionary was expressed with the wheel in the logotype and in the main page. A wheel as a symbol of cyclic, eternity and life. This paper shows the structure of the dictionary composition in interaction with the computer and graphical solutions in the web application.
The Interactive thematic dialect dictionary is the result of the students’ interdisciplinary project SSOLP (Slovar starega orodja v govoru Loškega Potoka), part of the Student Innovative Projects for Social Benefit 2016-2020, which was supported by Public Scholarship, Development, Disability and Maintenance Fund of the Republic of Slovenia, and co-financed by Ministry of Education, Sciences and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia and European Social Found (European Union).
The aims of the project were:
- audio and video documentation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Loški Potok region;
- scientific record (in phonetic transcription) of dialects for old tools, utilities, and customs;
- equip the existing collection of objects with labels in literary and dialect Slovene and English.