The Web site

In this project a web site is being developed to give access to a database containing entries in the first and fourth editions of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. The development is funded by The Leverhulme Trust under the direction of Anne McDermott and forms the second phase of the Johnson Dictionary Project which is based in the Johnson Centre located in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham.

Already, as part of the first phase of the project, the first and fourth editions of Johnson's Dictionary had been produced in electronic form and research has progressed to the construction of a relational database, structured in ways which will allow the inclusion of the sources of all the illustrative quotations and bibliographical information about all the source texts. In the second phase this information is to be made accessible from a web site.

The web-site was designed by Mike Beilby and accesses a database adapted by Jem Clear. Search criteria are set up using multi-level menus that are created on-the-fly by Javascript code.

The resulting queries are POST-ed to a second web site where they are processed and the results are returned where they are formatted and displayed under the control of further Javascript code.

Experiments are continuing into different aspects of the user interface.