For one of my grad school classes I have to construct a thesaurus on a specific topic that could be used for indexing. I chose sailing cause I love it. The terms have to be related hierarchically and so in order to keep track of them I wrote them on index cards and hung them up on the wall. Luis enjoyed them very much. And it made me feel smart, like the guys with their boards of equations in The Big Bang Theory. hahaha. Anyway, when I took them off of the wall to type them Luis was very upset. But I am almost finished with my project, I just have to type up the introduction, and I am very happy.In a side note, I just watched like 4 Christmas related commercials....
Hello, Sam!
ReplyDeleteI'm really sorry to bother you, and you don't know me because I live really far from the US, but the fact is that I need to do a kind of work with the thesaurus that you did and I decided to ask for help from you, stupid as it sounds)))
I just don't reall know what to start with and so I was googling when I got the link to your blog.
So, if you don't mind of course and have time could you please help?
You can post something here I'll try to follow it. If not - well, thanks anyway for reading this!
Good luck,
Natalie
Hello!
ReplyDeleteI can try to help you. What exactly are you looking for?
Oh, thanks!
ReplyDeleteWell, I think I need to know exactly what to do, you know, step by step. I mean I have only a vague idea about it.
Like I need to take some texts on some topic (youth policy in my case) and search for the words that are most often used. Or did you look for just terms?
And how did you arrange them hierarchically?
Oh, and maybe you've got some books or something about how to make them because all I can find is general descriptions of thesauri, no practical tips.
Thanks again,
Natalie
Well, I spent a lot of time looking through books and websites that dealt with my topic (sailing). Glossaries were good because they included a lot of terms that are used most often. I just gathered together the most often used terms and wrote them on index cards and then grouped them together to see how they related to each other. In doing the hierarchy, I would just look for the similarities, like I wanted to include parts of a sailboat so I included schematics and then divided everything up what they related to (like parts of the boat that related to the sails versus actual parts of the boat). The only real tips I have are don't start with too many terms because you'll get overwhelmed, we were told to have between 2 and 5 broadest terms (we had a total of 150 terms, so it depends on how large the thesaurus is), and using index cards is helpful cause you can move things around. I don't have any books, most of my information came from lectures, but this website was helpful: http://publish.uwo.ca/~craven/677/thesaur/main01.htm
ReplyDeleteOK, thanks a lot! Again))
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that I was supossed to do a glossary first but obviously that's too much! Because in the field of youth policy you can hardly find any real terms. So it's just hard to decide what you should include into it. But with a thesaurus I couldn't work out how to put all the words together - frequency or topics or whatever. And, in general, I had to make sure that I got it right.
The only question I still have is about index cards. I'm sorry but English is my second language, so do you mean cards in alphabetic order or what by index cards?
I guess it's just high time to finally start doing something. Then I'll know what questions to ask and if it's a real problem or not))
Thank you again, Sam. I really appreciate your help!
Natalie
we put our terms together by broadest to narrowest. Index cards are just little cards that you can write one word on and it makes it easier to arrange them in the order you want (in your hierarchy). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_card
ReplyDeleteThank you, Sam!
ReplyDeleteand the previous link was helpful, too!
Really sorry to bother you.
And thanks for your help!
Natalie