Collins Online provides information about the word’s frequency (not seen below), pronunciation, grammar category and and definitions of 3 senses with an example each. I’m not sure, however, what is meant by sug’gester (noun) being an alternative form of suggest (verb). It isn’t connected to the entry of sug’gester in Collins either (there’s no such entry in the dictionary) so I just wouldn’t know. This is followed by information on the origin of the word, its synonyms and a link to Thesaurus, translations in a number of languages but not my own (Slovene and Hungarian) and usage examples (which senses are illustrated is not clear). This is a mess.

If I compare this to Macmillan Dictionary’s entry, I must say I prefer the latter. First of all, I like the fact that I can view the shorter or longer version of the entry – depending on my needs. Next, they offer 4 senses with examples that illustrate each sense of the word separately with highlighted patterns of usage. The thesaurus entries are also adjusted to the individual senses of the word. Advice is also given to learners of English about the correct use of the word and alternative ways of conveying the same meaning. And it looks neat.

Collins Online: suggest

Macmillan Dictionary: suggest

The Collins dictionary, however, has something useful that Macmillan doesn’t. Right to the entry, you can see 3 boxes: browse nearby words, suggest photos from Flickr and word usage trends (default: last 10 years) for suggest. While the photos might be useful with some nouns, I don’t see a point in using them with verbs like suggest.  Also, Flickr photos can cause a lot of confusion if they are not selected carefully (check the box for foot). However, since incorporating an image or video is no longer a problem, online dictionaries could easily make better use of multimedia with selected entries.

Macmillan allows you to check the verb forms with a click (Collins does not), but it does not give a list of related words. I think its advertising revenue would not suffer much if a box with related words would replace an advertisement. Also, the box with information on a word’s frequency in the past is a keeper. It helps students put a word’s frequency in perspective. Language changes. Imagine this information was available for each sense of a word or even for its collocates!

All in all, I remain a Macmillan Dictionary fan.

There’s only one thing that made me feel uneasy. Since it was an international conference I had a feeling that it was impolite to present a paper in Slovene, the local language, when participants came from six different countries. I really don’t think I’m less of a Slovene because I use English when I present a paper at a conference. International conferences aim to open up space for communication and exchange of views around a particular topic. Presenting in Slovene honestly hindered communication if you didn’t speak the language (even though there were two colleagues offereing consecutive translation into English).

We can pay respect to the Slovene language in other ways and at other times. I believe it is sufficient if the conference website and the conference programme offer information both in English and Slovene (other languages are also welcome), and that conference proceedings offer a longer summary of all papers in Slovene. This is also the practice we follow in the Editorial board of Scripta Manent.

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PS

And this was Mojca Jarc’s and my paper:

The long and winding road to international academic recognition: the case of Slovene social sciences authors
English has become the dominant language of scientific communication. In 2004, more than 90% of articles published in social sciences journals tracked by the ISI Web of Science were written in English language. Therefore, scholars from non-English speaking backgrounds have been increasingly under pressure to write in a foreign language if they wish to disseminate their research results in high impact journals and receive recognition (Lillis & Curry 2006; Lillis, Hewings & Vladimirou 2010). The comparative bibliometrical profile of research in Slovenia (Sorčan et al. 2008) showed that, in 2005, Slovene authors publishing in the field of social sciences ranked relatively low in terms of ISI Web of Science Country indicators. Although the implications of these figures need to be handled carefully, they nevertheless open the question of whether having to write and publish for international audiences hinders Slovene social sciences scholars’ access to mainstream academic journals. The aim of our paper therefore is to provide a much needed insight into the writing and publishing practices of Slovene social sciences authors in local and international contexts. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews to analyze the strategies Slovene authors use to construct their knowledge identities within a given scientific community. 

We were first thinking of focusing on citation motivations of sociology scholars by following the methodology used by Harwood in his paper “An interview-based study of the functions of citations in academic writing across two disciplines” (published in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2009). However, we encountered a number of problems when piloting Harwood’s methodology: scholars were not really keen on going through all the citations used in a paper they’d written. Also, they had difficulty articulating why they were using a particular citation (they were content to say “To support my claim”). Using this method then would make the interviews painstakingly long and also a bit of a nuisance for scholars as we’d have to drill into their motivations. Also the transciption costs would rise high and we have a limited budget: we have to finance our research on our own. All in all, we decided for a different focus and methodology. Our respect for Harwood’s study, however, is even greater than before.

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

In his recent talk at CERN, Larry Lessing discussed copyright in scientific and artistic publishing  as well as amateur remixing. He calls for change that would bring free access to knowledge globally.

I couldn’t agree more with that, however, I’d need some help persuading my colleagues to listen and introduce change in what they do. The great majority of them are not ready to question copyright policies of scientific publishers. Perhaps if we keep repeating our point long enough…

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(I thank @bourdieu for the link.)