Literature Review

Websites

Canadian Curling Association - L'Association Canadienne de curling
http://www.curling.ca

According to this association, "curling has become synonymous with Canada," and we couldn’t agree more. This site was home to one of the most extensive curling thesauri/glossaries we found online, and contains a very informative Curling Hall of Fame, which includes notable players in curling history. The site is also home recent curling news items and features a listing of all major Canadian curling championships, including Canadian Junior national tournaments. A clip art and photo gallery are currently under construction, as is an animated explanation of curling rules, shots, and techniques.

Curling Basics
http://www.curlingbasics.com

This website is a useful source of information for newcomers to curling. Although it contains no formal glossary, the site does have one extremely useful and original feature: in addition to verbal definitions of the major curling shots, there are twenty-one flash animations illustrating them. Some of the curling shots are quite complex and a verbal description can sometimes be confusing to a beginner. The animations were thus a very helpful tool for clarifying difficult concepts, and even for clarifying certain hierarchical relationships such as the relationship between 'takeout' and types of takeout such as 'raise takeout' and 'double takeout'. The site does not feature a controlled vocabulary. The site contains pages on both the World Curling Federation Rules and Canadian rules, but we did not use the rules section as a source of terms.

CurlingRocks.com—Curling’s Home on the Net
http://www.curlingrocks.com

This is a comprehensive website consisting of a directory, news and curling updates, a library, calendar, discussion board, and general information on the sport, rules, history, and terminology--all useful resources for curling terminology and the context in which it is used. The most useful aspect of the site for our purposes was the glossary. It consists of sixty-five terms arranged alphabetically with a brief descriptor for each term. This helped with determining appropriate placement in term hierarchies and categories because some curling terminology is non-intuitive. For example, in curling, "rink" is a homograph that can mean either a group of players or a curling facility, but the correct term for the ice area on which the game is played is "sheet." As many curling terms consist of compound terms and hyphenated words, this glossary could easily be compared to glossaries in other sources we consulted to determine lexical variants. Parenthetical comments are included with some terms for clarification.

International Olympic Committee – Sports – Curling
http://www.olympic.org/uk/sports/programme/index_uk.asp?SportCode=CU

While this site only scratches the surface of all there is to know about curling, it featured a curling glossary of technical terminology that was indispensable in the initial stages of gathering information on Olympic curling. It was most useful in helping us to determine which terms were particular to certain regions or geographic areas, and which terms were widely used in international competition. The site is home to a feature on curling history, as well as a feature that explains the basic equipment used in the sport. Unlike other online glossaries consulted for this project, the IOC's glossary does not use parenthetical qualifiers for clarification.

The United States Curling Association
http://www.usacurl.org/

The United States Curling association is the governing and regulating body of the sport in the United States. While this site focuses on the sport as it is played in the United States, we drew a number of our preferred and non-preferred terms from their Fundamentals of Curling glossary. We discovered during the process of comparing the terms listed here and on the Olympic and Canadian curling websites that there were some regional and national differences among curling terms. The glossary does not use parenthetical qualifiers to clarify certain terms, but does use quotes to indicate words that might be used colloquially, such as "swingy" ice, used to describe ice with variable conditions.

Books

Bolton, Rod, and Ann Douglas. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Curling. Complete Idiot’s Guide. Scarborough, ON: Alpha Books/Prentice Hall, 1998.

This is a comprehensive, yet easily understood introductory guide to all aspects of curling in the North American setting. It is therefore very useful for our context because it is expected that most of our thesaurus users will not be familiar with the terminology, rules, and other aspects of the sport. The book includes a glossary which we utilized to select terms for the thesaurus. It also provides some archaic Scottish terminology which assisted us in the process of choosing preferred terms for the North American context. The glossary did not, however, differentiate between Olympic terminology and the general terminology of the game, however, which would have been helpful for our purposes. The glossary is arranged alphabetically, for ease of use and includes a brief definition of each term. Equivalent terms are indicated by "or" as in "Lose Handle or Lose Turn" and parenthetical glosses are used to clarify meaning or to indicate the origin of the term. Chapter headings and subheadings throughout the book were also useful for determining terms and the subsequent discussions clarified meaning.

Fortin, François. Sports: The Complete Visual Reference. Willowdale, ON: Firefly Books, 2000.

This encyclopaedic book features brief entries for most sports consisting of no more than two pages each. It is divided into sections by type of sport. Curling can be found in the section for precision sports, not ice sports, as might be expected. The sports categories in this text would be helpful to refer to at a later time should our micro-thesaurus expand to include other sports. The section headings under curling were an aid in categorizing terms and identifying possible node labels. There are several labelled diagrams to illustrate features of the sport, such as the rink, scoring points, technique, and equipment--again, a useful aid for determining correct context and categories for terms and possible related terms. Because of its conciseness, this source was also useful in determining possible key concepts and preferred terminology.

Mott, Morris and John Allardyce. Curling Capital. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 1989.

This book is about curling and its relationship to Winnipeg, the city that has been referred to as "the Mecca of curling". The book contains an excellent glossary which we used as a source of terms. Naturally, the glossary had a Canadian slant. It was helpful in not only defining terms but also in establishing preferred and non-preferred terms through its cross-references. For example, under 'stone', the reader is told 'see rock'. The glossary contained a number of curling events, especially Manitoban events, that were too specific for the first edition of our language. The book also contained a diagram of the playing surface, which made clear the layout of the various markings on the sheet.

Smith, David B. Curling: An Illustrated History. Edinburgh, John Donald Publishers Limited, 1981.

This book contains an index, a glossary and a natural language commentary. The index itself was not particularly useful, since it was a general back-of-the-book type index, and was not intended to be a glossary of terms per se. We did not use it as a source of terms. The glossary was disappointingly short, had gaps, and had a very Scottish slant. Finally, in a chapter entitled 'curler's jargon', the author walks the reader through an imaginary match. This obviously still had a Scottish slant, but was useful for the uninitiated because it put a number of terms in context. Because the book was written in Scotland, it was also useful for helping to establish, in conjunction with North American sources, which terms were truly international. Only those terms that were common with our other sources were chosen.

Theissen, Roy D. Curling Handbook: For Curlers, Teachers & Coaches. Saanichton, Toronto, and Seattle: Hancock House, 1977.

This handbook consists of eleven brief chapters on curling for use by coaches of the sport. Chapter topics included were history, terminology, equipment, rules, and discussions of technique and strategy. All of these featured extensive terminology and definitions which was useful for our purposes. There were also numerous diagrams which also helped with understanding the terminology.

White, Jess R., ed. Sports Rules Encyclopedia, 2d ed. Champaign IL: Leisure Press, 1990.

This source provides six pages of information on the International Curling Federation (ICF) and the United States Curling Association (USCA) rules for curling. There are fourteen headings in the entry which was helpful for determining where to place terminology in the hierarchies and categories. Terminology used in the rules was also clarified by the subsequent discussion. Additionally, an extensive diagram of the sheet showing all of the markings and required distances helped to clarify obscure terminology visually and was an aid to classification of terms. The discussion of rules pertaining to stones, teams, delivery, and so on, also helped us to understand how to group terms. For instance, "burned stones" and "altered stones" are discussed under the entry for "touched running stones" so these variants can be used to show narrower and equivalent relationships.

Films

Gross, Paul. Men With Brooms. Dir. by Paul Gross. 102 min. Alliance Atlantis Films, 2003. Videocassette.

The tagline says "There's more than one way to sweep a woman off her feet." Apparently one of those ways is through winning a curling tournament in Northern Ontario. This charming yet slightly off-kilter film did not produce any terms that we could use in our thesaurus, but it provided much-needed insight into the Canadian curling culture.