Piloting a workflow for extracting author citations from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language

Since the 18th century, English-language dictionaries have used quo- tations from written works to illustrate a word's use in context. These quotations form a link between language authority and literary authority. In this paper we pilot a workflow for identifying, extracting, and counting author citations in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language to investigate how au- thors in a defined corpus are represented. We consider how these authors are distributed across the text and compare our results to past studies that used dif- ferent methodologies. We find a consistency that encourages the broader appli- cation of our workflow on other dictionary texts, enabling further study of au- thor citations in dictionaries across time