It’s been a while since my last Lexicon of Scholarly Editing update, but as I said in my previous post, that’s because I’m saving up the information for when I have a little more to say, and post more current updates as they are happening via my Twitter account. Since then, I’ve added two more chapters of Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes to the Lexicon (the ‘Introduction‘ and Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s contribution); texts by Elena Pierazzo, M.J. Driscoll, and Kenneth Price; two new categories (Scholarly Digital Editing and Markup) that became necessary after adding Lou Burnard‘s ‘What is SGML’ to the Lexicon; as well as three texts on the TEI: one from 2004 by Edward Vanhoutte, one from 2009 by Wittern, Ciula and Tuohy, and one from 2014, also by Lou Burnard.
The month of May has been an especially big month for the Lexicon: on May 19th, the the Lexicon celebrated its six month anniversary. And as if that wasn’t enough, we reached a couple more milestones on that day. We passed the mark of 1.000 visits; we added our 500th definition to the Lexicon; as well as our 300th entry. After 6 months online, I thought it might be time for a little status rapport. (Because it’s a FAQ: yes, as an administrator my own page views etc. are filtered out of the following results).
At the moment, the Lexicon has reached 1.123 page views, from a total of 35 different countries:
Fig. 1: Views per Country
But where do people go when they visit the website? Here is our current ‘Top Ten’ of most visited pages:
- Home page / Archives: 375
- Home: 234
- Bibliography: 67
- Affiliations & Links: 31
- Subscribe: 21
- On the Materiality of Text: 18
- News: 17
- Credits: 17
- edition (documentary digital): 15
- The ‘Multilemma of a Multilingual Lexicon of SE: 15
Because this website is a Lexicon you probably won’t be surprised to hear that, for me at least, the most interesting views are those of Lexicon terms. As you can see, however, the first real ‘Lexicon Term’ only just reaches the Top Ten, with exactly 1/25 of the number of views of the ‘Home page / Archives’. But of course, that’s mainly because there are so many different entries in our Lexicon. If we divide the pageviews up into different views per page-type, we get a clearer picture of what our users are looking for when they visit the website:
Fig. 2: Total Page Views
As you can see in Fig. 2, the ‘Home page / Archives’ are still taking the lead with well over half of the page views; but the Lexicon has gained a lot of ground, representing almost a quarter of the views. The rest of the hits are divided up between blog posts and other pages. To nuance these results further, it’s relevant to mention that the biggest slice of the pie chart does not only count homepage hits, but that it counts views of archive pages as well. This means that in this statistic, whenever someone starts browsing the Lexicon (be it by clicking on the Lexicon tab, by browsing a specific category, or by searching for a term through the search bar), those page views add to the total of ‘Home page / Archives’ category, while they should actually add to the Lexicon category. At the moment, WordPress does not provide the option to nuance that category further.
In any case, all these statistics seem to suggest that the Lexicon is actually being used, which makes me very happy indeed! Thank you all for making this possible, by visiting and/or subscribing to the website, by following our updates on Twitter, by keeping track of our public Zotero bibliography, or by suggesting new sources for the Lexicon.
All the best,
Wout
