Sarah Ogilvie
Saturday 26th September - 16.00
Sarah Ogilvie teaches at the University of Oxford, and specializes in language, dictionaries, and technology. As a lexicographer she has been an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and was Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries in Australia. As a technologist she has worked in Silicon Valley at Lab 126, Amazon's innovation lab, where she was part of the team that developed the Kindle. She originally studied computer science and mathematics before taking her doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, and then taught at Cambridge and Stanford.
What do three murderers, Karl Marx's daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. Begun in 1858, the OED has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men. But the Dictionary didn’t just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public and was one of the world’s first crowd-sourced projects. Sarah Ogilvie has discovered previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of the OED. In this session, she tells the story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world – and celebrates the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People, the unsung heroes of the OED.
