On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 09:36 +0000, Abdullah Alger wrote:
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.
I don't know minitab, but I'm wondering if XML and XQuery might be a useful way of getting at this data--of course I don't know exactly where you are with it or what you are doing. There would be issues with multiple hierarchies, but they wouldn't be unsolvable. In my new function, of course, I'd strongly recommend TEI for it as well ;)
-dan