Author lexicography in the digital age

The present paper discusses the process of digitalization of modern Russian lexicography using one of its directions as the example. We chose author lexicography, which is understood as the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries of the language of individual authors and groups of authors (writers, scientists, philosophers, politicians, etc.). This scientific area has been actively developing in recent decades, which is largely due to the emergence and improvement of digital technologies that make it possible to process significant volumes of text and to structure the results obtained on various bases. To rely on the methodology of lexicographic criticism, the paper examines different types of electronic author dictionaries: actually electronic, created in the digital environment, and electronic versions of printed dictionaries. The research focuses on projects of dictionaries of the first group, which were based on philologically verified text corpora with rich markup. Their theoretical support, intermediate and final results, strengths and weaknesses are analyzed. Particular attention is paid, on the one hand, to author concordances, the information capabilities of which have significantly expanded with the use of new technological tools, and, on the other hand, to complex types of lexicographical products that combine a dictionary, a corpus of texts, a software tool and a user manual. It is shown that the originality and advantage of electronic author dictionaries are found both in the absence of restrictions on their volume, and in the possibility of using hyperlinks, in sorting by various parameters, etc. This is also demonstrated by information and search systems, which were created based on materials of author dictionaries of different genres in book versions. The paper is illustrated with examples from various dictionaries for the works of Russian writers and poets of the 18th–20th centuries.