The Dictionary of Words in the Wild is a community collection of images of public textuality, specifically words outside of the usual print contexts. We are interested in words that are:
The idea for the Dictionary came from discussions at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities when Geoffrey Rockwell was there in 2001-2, especially discussions around the deformance of textuality and transcoding. Thanks to all the Ivanhoe folk for the spicy lunch meetings.
You can browse the dictionary, search for words and check our statistics. Do you have ideas? Please contact us if you have an application for the Dictionary.
Users should only upload images for which they have secured copyright. It is understood that by uploading users are assigning a non-exclusive license to the Dictionary to make the image available over the internet until such time as the user removes the image.
If you believe an image has been inappropriately uploaded to the Dictionary please e-mail Geoffrey Rockwell, geoffrey dot rockwell at ualberta dot ca.
We are happy to provide accounts to legitimate users. Send Geoffrey Rockwell (geoffrey dot rockwell at ualberta dot ca) an email if you want an account. We reserve the right to delete inappropriate images or images whose copyright is contested. We reserve the right to delete accounts if they are misused.
The Dictionary of Words in the Wild is an interactive media project led by Geoffrey Rockwell at the University of Alberta.
This is now Version 2.0 of the Dictionary. It is maintained by the Arts Resource Centre of the University of Alberta and was developed by Mark McKellar, Kamal Ranaweera, Omar Rodriguez-Arenas and Melania Ru'aini.
Infrastructure support initially came from the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) project. Andrew MacDonald was responsible for the development and graphic design of the first version of the website. Thanks also to Lian Yan who helped with the first version.