[Update] In the meantime Ana de Castro Salgado has started her researching visit at Real Academia Española (RAE).
ELEXIS asked her about her impressions and outcomes and to tell us, in which way she has gathered insights and experience so far.
It becomes apparent that winning an ELEXIS travel grant enables a different perspective on the possibilities of undertaking research and enriches the individual point of view:

I’m on the way to the last week in Madrid, knowing the lexicographical work developed at the Real Academia Española (RAE), namely in the Centro de Estudios of RAE, its infrastructures and computational and linguistic tools. Being a researcher at NOVA CLUNL and a PHD student in Terminology at NOVA Lisbon, I am enjoying the ELEXIS research visit.

“Lexicographers will not die; we just have to change the perspective and potentiate all the content we create daily.”

I’m in the Instituto de Lexicografía (ILex), with the team of lexicographers, whose main function is to prepare the lexicographic works, especially the Diccionario de lengua española (DLE), working on a computer platform in JAVA and XML, the Entorno de Redacción Integrado (ERI), which will be replaced with a new centralized and standardized infrastructure that will house all academic lexicographical work.
The next edition of the DLE will be digital and the new structure is already prepared. The Spanish and the Portuguese Academies are using the standard format TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), which will make it possible to exchange data in the future.

It has been an excellent opportunity to talk and share ideas with other lexicographers, proving that in fact the most problematic lexicographical issues are universal and our concerns are the same, whether it is a dictionary for Spanish or for Portuguese.
This highlights the importance of projects such as ELEXIS.

“Lexicographers must make an effort to break with the past and embrace the era of digital revolution in order to learn how to benefit from it.”

It has been very advantageous to understand how the work of updating the Diccionario de lengua española (DLE) is processed, since it is a more complex process than doing the same for the Portuguese equivalent: Just like in Portugal, the RAE has academic plenaries and different committees to approve the changes. On top of that, it also interacts with the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE), distributed throughout the Hispanic world.

I also had the opportunity to get to know the content of the master’s degree in Lexicografía Hispánica (which results from a protocol between the University of León and RAE) and how the lexicographical work has been integrated into the courses.

I have also explored other projects developed by RAE, such as CORPES (Corpus del Español del siglo XXI), a continuously growing corpus and Nuevo Diccionario Histórico (CDH), which tries to elaborate a biography of each vocabulary and its evolution in time, using advanced technology.
I would like to highlight a new platform of resources and linguistic services of RAE, accessible through a subscription: ENCLAVE.
Hence, I emphasize the DLE23 interface, with onomasiological, semasiological and paradigmatic information.

ASPECTS FOR FURTHER REFLECTION:
The criteria for the usage labels of the DLE are different from the ones used for the Portuguese dictionary of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa.
I think it would be advantageous for us lexicographers, linguists, terminologists, engineers, and computer scientists, to unify this specific information – for example using DCR in general language dictionaries.
The last and for me most important point is that we, lexicographers who worked for many years on printed dictionaries, must make an effort to break with the past and embrace the era of digital revolution in order to learn how to benefit from it. We need to broaden the scope of dictionaries from a product that fulfills a single purpose. Through the usage of lexical organized databases we are able to extract larger and more diverse information and build new products that can satisfy multiple users needs. This is our biggest challenge. Lexicographers will not die; we just have to change the perspective and potentiate all the content we create daily.

A reference to my ELEXIS travel grant project can be found here.