Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
Well it really depends on what you want to do. If the goal is to extract information and then calculate scores, XML+XSL can do that. You could also use XSL to produce delimited text for adhoc spreadsheets in Excel. I don't know what your starting point is.
-dan
On Mon, 2006-06-11 at 00:23 +0000, Abdullah Alger wrote:
I also thought about XML, because of its flexibility, but if I decided to use XML then wouldn't I have to write all the code for it? It would take a lot of time, unless there was a way that I could do it through excel.
Abdullah,
I believe modern versions of excel allow you to export tables into a form of XML. Which then could certainly be queried with XQuery or transformed with XSLT. I'd be interested in what form you have the texts at the moment, or whether you are starting from scratch.
What I'd suggest is not to limit yourself necessarily to one technology, but use those applications which are fit for purpose. Excel is good at typical spreadsheet applications and some statistical work, Access (and other RDMS like mysql) are good at relating large tables of non-nested information, SPSS is quite good at performing statistical analysis, XML Databases are good at enabling queries between hierarchically structured documents.
We have, thankfully, reached a point where putting your information in any one of these does not stop you exporting, transforming, and importing portions of the information into another application. There are other options, such as linguistic analysis software such as Xaira.
My advice generally with textual materials is to create a a detailed text in a neutral an easily transformable format (and for me this is TEI XML), and then generate the input expected by other programs when needed. For example, a CSV file to import into Access or Excel. To me comparing formulaic patterns with punctuation is a form of textual analysis akin to computational linguistics, and so I would use markup (say a teiCorpus structure) and any existing tools where applicable.
Let us know how you get along,
-James