Fare linguistica applicata con le digital humanities

With the aim of addressing lexicographic issues for developing dictionaries in a smartphone format, this paper describes the design phases of Idiomatica, a dictionary app of Italian idi- oms for L2 learners. Reviewing the major breakthroughs in electronic lexicography, challenging topics in the field are foregrounded in the discussion. Although lexicography has significantly contrib- uted to develop research methods in linguistics, especially with corpus studies, the way dictionaries are designed stands outdated and poor. To address these issues, two different prototypes of Idiomatica have been designed and tested with their perspective users, i.e. L2 Italian students, by following a human-centred design approach. Special attention in the paper is given to the microstructural components, the lexicographic data provided, and the design protocols adopted for developing the dictionaries so far.