Working with Digital Data

in Religious Studies

5. Accessing & Structuring Datasets: Structure Your Data with Tables and Databases

Summer Semester 2024
Prof. Dr. Nathan Gibson

Outline

1. Text Formats: Review & Final Thoughts
   1. Hands-on Review: Markdown
   2. Review of Text: Plain Text, Markdown, Markup
   3. XML as Markup
      –Break–
2. Tables & Databases
   1. Entities & Relationships: Activity 1
   2. Entities & Relationships: Activity 2
   3. Database Formats

1.1. 📈 Hands-on Review: Objective

Last objective: Be able to add formatting or structure to your text with markdown and markup (HTML and XML).

1.1. 📈 Hands-on Review: What is Markdown?

• Plain text + special characters such as *, _, #, - to add simple formatting
• Open & exportable to HTML, Word, PDF

1.1. 📈 Hands-on Review: What is markup?

• Formatting or structured information added to text.
• Usually HTML or XML (format <tag attribute="value">some text</tag>)
• hierarchical

1.2. 📈 Review of Text: Plain Text, Markdown, Markup

1.3. 📈 HTML vs. XML as Markup: HTML

Semantic (“meaningful”) information in HTML: metadata (title, keywords, date) & sometimes more

• HTML is a standard for how content should be displayed

• But it doesn’t tell you what that information is

1.3. 📈 HTML vs. XML as Markup: XML

XML is semantic.

• It shows the structure or meaning of the information

• But it doesn’t tell you how it should be displayed

• XML has many standards or rule sets (“schemas”) to choose from. You can even invent your own!

1.3. 📈 HTML vs. XML as Markup: TEI

TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) provides one of these schemas.

• invented by humanist scholars for working on texts (history, philology, literary studies, etc.)

• a way to “highlight” certain things you want to study in a text (e.g., words, grammatical forms, textual variations, historical persons or places) and make it possible to “grab” them from the text for analysis

1.3. 📈 HTML vs. XML as Markup: TEI Examples

• See Recogito as an easy tool to get started with text markup, e.g., https://recogito.pelagios.org/document/2tfsif6dijiayb
• Good XML editors: Visual Studio Code (with extra plugins) or Oxygen XML

Break

🧭 Today’s Learning Objective

Structure your data as “entities” and “relationships” using tables.

2.1. Entities & Relationships: Cat in the Hat Game

Thing 1 > does x to > Thing 2

2.2. Entities & Relationships: What are they?

• entity: a thing in a database “with an identity independent of change to its attributes” (Wikipedia)
• attribute: information about about an entity
• relationship: statements linking entities

2.2. Entities & Relationships: Religion in Film

IMDB: What entities, attributes, and relationships do you see there?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j13FMOnXBvEqQnU9s1MuhSn1wcMf92c7O2Zc9wcUOYQ/edit?usp=sharing

2.3. Databases: What are they?

2.3. Databases: What are they?

Tables of relationships or a model of the universe

2.3. Database Formats

Preview

1. Accessing & Structuring Datasets: Clean and Augment Your Data with OpenRefine