Sheryl McDonald

The web applications for ONP continue to be unstable. This appears to be due to continuing unprecedented demand on the services that run on these servers. (We've been monitoring the situation and since yesterday there are on average over 30 connections to the database every second!)

Yes! Managed to get in on the Dictionary’s roundtable. Should be nice to catch up with folks

Looking forward to it! 🙌

Mysterious carving found in northern Ontario wilderness | CBC News Seven years after it was discovered in the northern Ontario bush near the town of Wawa, a carving in the bedrock remains an archaeological, mystery. But plans are in the works to develop it into a tou...

A bizarre runic carving in northern Ontario. Not medieval, but younger, 1800s, the Lord’s Prayer carved in bedrock, possibly by a Swedish worker of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and buried under inches of topsoil. Good article.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Runologist Henrik Williams, quoted in the article, has also done a lot of work on other North American runic finds, see some other examples here: www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/di...

The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose is a lexicographical miracle, so it’s frustrating to read that LLM web crawlers are rendering its website harder to use.

Very interesting (if also frustrating!) to see knock on effects of gen AI’s increased use on other websites/internet resources such as the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose…

If you're interested, the main culprit seems to be ChatGPT's web crawler. This hasn't been a problem with other web crawlers such as Google, Bing, etc. The difference seems to be that web searches aren't particularly interested in very slow, data-heavy pages.

Our web services are experiencing very heavy demand at the moment, which is at times overloading the servers. We should get an upgrade soon but until then you may experience downtime.

I got this letter today too. Very saddened to see this takeover :(

Ecocritical Theory: Literature, Culture and Environment - Universitetet i Agder Les denne saken på UiAs nettsider.

Intensive PhD course Ecocritical Theory: Literature, Culture and Environment
www.uia.no/om-uia/fakul...
At the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway, 26–28 November 2025. Can be taken as a 2 or 5 ECTS course.
Registration open now.
#envhum #ecocrit

“Smoke from Canadian forest fires can be seen in the sky over Denmark”

Tonight I noticed the sky was hazy and the sun bright orangey-red as it was about to set and it reminded me of forest fire season back in Canada. Turns out that was exactly what it was 😢

The spiral tower of Church of Our Saviour (Vor Frelsers Kirke) in Christianshavn, Copenhagen, rising above the top of an old brick building with rows of white windows. The evening sky in the background is pale blue.

Copenhagen ❤️

Woman smiling, standing in front of a row of five apartment buildings shaped like rolling waves, on the edge of the water, in Vejle, Denmark.

Nice walk yesterday morning to have a peek at Bølgen (The Wave) apartments in Vejle.

We are now hearing a plenary lecture from Sanni Nimb on promoting equality and removing bias (gender/race/ethnicity) in Danish dictionaries: “Metoder til fremme af ligestilling i Den Danske Ordbog, Den Danske Begrebsordbog og afledte sprogteknologiske ressourcer”

Great day so far at Nordic Lexicography Conference

Og sidste på panelen har vi redaktør og leder i ONP Tarrin Wills: “Den digitale brug af præskriptiv normalisering i en historisk ordbog” (The digital use of prescriptive normalisation in a historical dictionary)

Nu fra ONPs redaktører Simonetta Battista og Johnny Lindholm, “ONP som deskriptiv og præskriptiv ressource” (ONP as a descriptive and prescriptive resource)

Ellert Þór Jóhannsson gives the talk, “Uformelle ord i Blöndals ordbog: En undersøgelse af ‘populær, daglig tale’”

Nu begynder det første panel. Vi starter med Ellert Þór Jóhannsson, “Uformelle ord i Blöndals ordbog: En undersøgelse af ‘populær, daglig tale’” (Informal words in Blöndal’s dictionary: an investigation of ‘popular, everyday speech’)

I will also be posting a bit from our @onp.ku.dk account during the conference with highlights from the sessions

Off to an early start today! Heading to Vejle in Jutland by train with my Dictionary colleagues for conference of the Nordisk forening for leksikografi (Nordic Lexicography Association)

Great to see this fascinating research published - congrats to Élodie Lévêque, @matthewcollins.bsky.social et al.

This sounds like a great citizen science opportunity in the humanities/history/paleography!

It’s sunny out, but it’s March, in Denmark! 10 degrees C outside (and windy!) and the water was just 4 degrees!!

A woman (me) swimming in Copenhagen harbour on a sunny spring day

I think I might be a winter bather now?? 😱

Female scribes! Putting this on my reading list!

Old Norse word of the day for the first day of Lent: fasta

We're having issues with our database server today - hopefully ONP will be up again soon!

Come learn about Old Norse manuscripts with me and my colleagues at the Summer School in Scandinavian Manuscript Studies in Copenhagen this August
#medievalsky

A small snow covered dock jutting out into the sea, with snowy bushes to the left on the shore. The sea snd sky are grey, the snow is bright white.

Snow day today in Denmark. Spent a beautiful afternoon at Louisiana Museum north of Copenhagen. This is the view from the gardens — on a clear day you can see Sweden across the sound.