Speaker
Description
As cultural objects, dictionaries perform several types of cultural work. For example, they have the ability to influence knowledge legitimation: they exercise power as they assign value to knowledge by dictating what knowledge is valuable and trustworthy (the knowledge found in dictionaries) and what is not (the knowledge omitted by dictionaries) (Menagarishvili, 2020). Dictionaries also create what Anderson (2006, p. 6) calls “imagined communities” that can be defined as communities consisting of people who “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Such communities are present in our lives even though most of the time we are unaware of them, and this invisibility, perhaps, makes imagined communities even more powerful. Finally, each dictionary is created within a certain cultural context that affects that dictionary’s content, design, and usage.
As artifacts of technical communication, dictionaries are a genre with many subgenres that can be used to communicate about technology. Each dictionary has an audience, a certain purpose, and a structure and is used in a certain way, which are all aspects of documents discussed by scientific and technical communication (Menagarishvili, 2023). Moreover, definitions are a typical technical communication genre that is taught in every technical communication class. Further, many dictionaries combine text and visuals, which is another technical communication topic taught and studied by technical communication instructors/researchers.
In this poster presentation, I will discuss dictionaries of civil and environmental engineering as cultural objects and as artifacts of technical communication. More specifically, I will compare the following dictionaries describing civil and environmental engineering discourse: The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms; McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of Engineering; A Dictionary of Civil and Environmental Engineering; A Dictionary of Construction, Surveying, and Civil Engineering; and Environmental Engineering Dictionary and Directory. The field of civil and environmental engineering was chosen for analysis because, as an Engineering Communication Program Director in a School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, I observed that dictionaries describing this vibrant field have not been discussed in the literature. These specific dictionaries were selected for analysis because they all describe civil and/or environmental engineering terminology but differ in their level of field specificity. They are listed above in order of increasing field specificity: technical terms–engineering terms–civil and environmental engineering terms–civil engineering-only terms / environmental engineering-only terms. This part of the study will include dictionary macrostructure and microstructure analysis.
In the second part of the study, I will explore what happens from the cultural studies and technical communication perspectives when civil and environmental engineering terms make the jump from traditional dictionaries to GenAI. Based on consultations with six civil and environmental engineering experts at a top-ranked technological university, I will select five widely used civil and environmental engineering terms from each of the six subfields of civil and environmental engineering (30 terms total). The six subfields include construction and infrastructure engineering; geosystems engineering; structural engineering, mechanics, and materials; transportation systems engineering; water resources engineering; and environmental engineering. I will then conduct a cultural and lexicographic analysis (1) of dictionary articles from the dictionaries listed above and (2) of definitions provided by five popular GenAI tools likely to be used by civil and environmental engineering students at a prestigious technological university in the US in the summer/fall 2026.
This poster presentation might be useful for lexicographers, instructors using dictionaries and/or GenAI in their classes, and the general public interested in dictionaries and/or GenAI.