data project

If you have ever gotten lost in scribbles, rows, columns and highlighting while trying
to use a spreadsheet or pen and paper for coding linguistic data, then a relational
database is a tool for you. It offers a clean and manageable way to code all of your
data consistently and accurately. This paper is not meant to be a complete manual for
using a database or all of the complexities of the Structured Query Language (SQL)
which powers its searching and counting functions. Rather, this paper serves as a
primer or how-to for using a relational database for linguistic analysis. Much of the
information around the internet related to databases was not straightforwardly
translatable to a linguist's needs, in particular the SQL code needed for counting
hierarchical data (multiple different attributes with multiple different values). I hope
the following can help you start utilizing this powerful tool with fewer growing pains.