Terry Joyce: ORBWLL

Online research bibliography of written language and literacy (ORBWLL)

[Updated: 20240307]

As ORBWLL itself is kindly being hosted within the AWLL's website, beyond recording its ongoing compilation (as a rather time-consuming activity!), the main function of this page is to encourage everyone to check it out. Thus, this page serves primarily as something of a footnote, or supplement, to the main ORBWLL page, in attempting to record some milestones in its ongoing development, without clogging up the main page with an excess of more mundane detail!

Development history

The origins of the ORBWLL trace back to a sub-project that I started in 200304 while a postdoctoral researcher on the Grammatological Informatics based on Corpora of Asian Scripts (GICAS) Center of Excellence Project at the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). With a modest but respectable collection of works on Asian scripts and writing systems in general, GICAS was a conducive environment for undertaking the initial compilation work.

Indeed, the very idea of tackling the compilation of an online resource (admittedly, with abundant naviety!) may never have occurred to me, if I had not encountered while there the two large tomes of Günther & Ludwig's (1994-1996) Schrift und Schriftlichkeit, the three bulky volumes of Ehlich, Coulmas, & Graefen's (1996) A bibliography on writing and written language and Bright's (1998) combined reviews of both (in the first volume of Written Language & Literacy of which he was the founding editor), which, among other points, questioned the appropriateness of publishing large-scale bibliographic data in bulky handbound volumes in the electronic age.

Thus, in terms of its scope, ORBWLL has always aspired to be as inclusive as possible. Reflecting the diverse perspectives that help to inform our understandings of scripts and writing systems, ORBWLL seeks to be interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on a range of domains, such as diachronic studies, linguistic approaches, sociolinguistic considerations, pedagogical questions, psycholinguistic investigations, to technological matters ..... as well as their related issues and concerns.

While dreams of keeping ORBWLL as up-to-date and as comprehensive as possible will always be utterly unrealistic (given the sheer scale of the endeavour and the realities of relatively limited research time for teaching faculty!), still, they also somehow always remain tantilizingly more attainable through maintaining ORBWLL as an online database that can be periodically (albeit rather sporadically) updated!!

Regrettably, the ORBWLL project was, of necessity, effectively shelved for quite some time, while I was a post-doc researcher on the Large-scale Knowledge Resources (LKR) COE Project at Tokyo Institute of Technology and during early teaching years at SGS. However, I have been slowly working over the last couple of years to reactive the ORBWLL project, essentially recreating the database with improved identification of sources for more effective generation of citation lists (still under development). But, there is still quite a nice buzz from inputting a recent source bibliography and identifying multiple citations for some more obscure reference, and so the intention to continue developing ORBWLL is still strong, and, if only, there was more time ....

As noted already, a number of source bibliographies were processed during a period of about two-years starting from 2003 and going into 2005. However, there also a longish fallow period of about 4-5 years until the end of 2008, when I again started to think earnestly about continuing to develop ORBWLL. On reassessing the data at that point, however, I also perceived a serious problem with the initial source idenifications, and so decided to effectively recreate the database from scratch with more appropriate identifications, in order to be able to also generate citation lists at some future point. After reprocessing all existing source bibliographies, new source bibliographies were also processed. The ongoing expansion of ORBWLL is demonstrated in the update record below.

Although the initial ORBWLL website (as of 201209) only presented the data in PDF format (one main file and one file of the most-frequently cited works), with sincere thanks for the special web-design skills, firstly, of Bor Hodošček, periodic revisions of the website (from 201403 to 202007) and, secondly, of Ikue Yawata (since 202104 to 202202) also provide more dynamic online access to V11 (regrettably not for V12 yet).

Update record

Version #	Date	Sources	Entries	Entries' citations	All entries	All citations
1	200303	163	478		5,250
2	200504	618	1,760		19,570
3	200509	794	2,514		26,785
4	201209	1,500	4,631	25,175	44,137	73,121
5	201308	1,750	5,229	30,610	49,595	85,702
6	201407	2,000	5,655	35,434	56,249	99,304
7	201608	2,250	6,135	40,358	62,915	113,094
8	201808	2,500	6,599	44,375	73,052	129,605
9	202007	2,750	7,065	48,763	84,245	147,825
10	202104	3,000	7,545	54,881	92,261	163,131
11	202204	3,750	9,300	67,238	120,266	208,654
12	202402	4,500	10,741	79,713	149,218	256,675

References

Bright, William. (1998). Reviews of Hartmut Günther & Otto Ludwig, (1994-96), Schrift und Schiftlichkeit: Ein interdiszipliplinäres Handbuch internationaler Forschung and Konrad Ehlich, Florian Coulmas, & Gabriele Graefen, (1996), A bibliography on writing and written language. Written Language and Literacy, 1, 137-141.

Ehlich, Konrad, Coulmas, Florian, & Graefen, Gabriele, (Eds.). (1996). A bibliography on writing and written language. (3 volumes). (Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs, 89). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Günther, Hartmut, & Ludwig, Otto, (Eds.). (1994). Schrift und Schriftlichkeit: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch internationaler Forschung [Writing and its use: An interdisciplinary handbook of international research], Volume 1. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.

Günther, Hartmut, & Ludwig, Otto, (Eds.). (1996). Schrift und Schriftlichkeit: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch internationaler Forschung [Writing and its use: An interdisciplinary handbook of international research], Volume 2. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.