Thanks for all the comments. I am currently using Excel, but I may end up using SPSS. I've tried Access, and it's complicated trying to obtain statistical information that I want which Excel seems to do with ease.
To tell you the truth, what I am doing is calculating the number of formulaic patterns and the number of punctuation marks in the Exeter Book. It is quite simple to look at all the information in Excel, but I cannot really compare results from the formulaic patterns with the punctuation practises, since the data is quite large and multidimensional. I think that Minitab would work well from what I have been told, but I have no experience with this tool.
Best, A.
Quoting Dan O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca:
Hi Abdullah,
Would you want to report back to us on what you decide? This seems like an interesting problem.
-dan
On Mon, 2006-30-10 at 14:46 +0100, Joris van Zundert wrote:
HI Abdullah,
You said 'data crunching'. It looks like I should interpret that as 'counting and computing numbers'. If so, stick to Excel. Access is a database. Databases are about describing/modeling, categorising, searching and selecting data. Spreadsheets are the things of use if you actually want to count things and apply statistics.
That said, you could do it in Access - but it would take a considerable amount of additional VBA-scripting to get Access to count your phenomena properly. Excel should provide standard functions and solutions in most cases.
If you're talking about really vast amounts of data, consider using more advanced statistical tools like SPSS or Stata.
Hope this helps, y.s., Joris van Zundert
On 10/29/06, Abdullah Alger Abdullah.Alger-2@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk wrote: Dear all,
I would like to ask for advice whether I should use MS Access or Excel for data crunching. I have been using Excel for some work I am doing on Old English poetry where I am looking at specific features of a fixed set of poems. However, I have decided also to look at other aspects of the same set of poems. To put it in a nutshell, I have three sets of data I want to compare concerning the same poems in order to see where the trends are. I know how to use Excel fairly well - at least to get statistical information - but I have been getting into trouble when trying to find trends across several sets of data. I thought about pivot tables, but I am not sure if that's the way to go, when I think that I may be able to do things easier in Access - even though I don't know anything about how to use it. Which application would you suggest I use? Best, Abdullah Alger _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l-- Mr. Joris J. van Zundert (MA) Huygens Institute Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences
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-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/ Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Associate Professor and Chair of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Vox: +1 403 329 2378 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/
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