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

    _______________________________________________ 
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Contact information can be found at http://www.brandaen.org

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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

Contact information can be found at http://www.brandaen.org

A disclaimer is applicable to this e-mail, please refer to http://www.brandaen.org/emaildisclaimer for more information _______________________________________________ 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

-- 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/

---

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

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.

Quoting Daniel O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca:

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

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, Department of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada Vox: +1 403 329-2378 Fax: +1 403 382-7191

---

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

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