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Examples of the use of databases
Below we briefly discuss a number of
examples of the use of databases in literary, cultural and linguistic research at
the VU Faculty of Humanities. In almost all cases they involve a combination of
source data (frequently obtained through archival research) or textual data and
analytical data inferred from these sources.
Reception of Bilderdijk 
This database, which was commissioned by the
Bilderdijk Museum, contains a systematic inventory of texts about the poet Willem Bilderdijk (fl. 1780 - 1910) and reviews of his work. The resulting
catalogue was intended to be an instrument for further research into BIlderdijk.
Example Data structure
The social embedding of the authorship of Jan Vos (1610-1667)
In her PhD research, Nina Geerdink examines the social anchoring and sociability of
seventeenth-century authorship in the Dutch Republic. Authorial representation
is the starting point: how did seventeenth-century authors represent themselves
in their poetry? And how did they use their self-representation to acquire or
consolidate a social position? The project focuses on the social poetry of
Amsterdam-based poet Jan Vos, investigating to what extent the construction and
representation of his cultural, social and religious identity in his poems can
be connected with the various jobs he had in Amsterdam: Fox worked as a glazier,
but had a second job as a theatre director. His career as a poet, glazier and
theatre director saw him frequently working for the city government, but he also
maintained contacts in (other) cultural and Catholic networks - Vos was not a
member of the public church, but of the Catholic Church.
All data related to
the collected works of Jan Vos are now available in an Access database, which
allows users to quickly find certain information (such as the title of that one
poem he wrote then and then, or the date of birth or occupation of a recipient
of one of his poems). On the other hand, the database has made it possible to
ask questions about the corpus that could not have been answered without a
database, or without a lot of counting, such as 'How many poems did Vos write
for Catholics?'and 'Are the poems Vos writes for the city regents different than his
poems for other poets?'. Answering these questions is important for the study,
because it allows researchers to map the network of the authors (recipients
also belong to their network), and look into their relationships to the people
in those networks (What kinds of poem were written for these people? How many
poems were written for them? How long were these poems?
Example 1
Example 2
Data structure
The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart
In her doctoral research, Nadine
Akkerman made an inventory of all known letters to and from the English
Queen Elizabeth Stuart from the period 1632-1642. An important aim of this
research was the publication of an index for these letters (The Correspondence
or Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume I and II, published by Oxford
University Press between 2011 and 2015), which was to serve as a tool for
further research. She used the inventory herself to analyse Elizabeth Stuart's
relational network, allowing her to answer questions such as "who wrote what, to
whom and how?' These answers could then be used to answer other questions such
as 'Was Elizabeth successful as a politically active woman?' and
'What was her role in the Thirty Years' War?'.
For this study Nadine Akkerman
used a database to store the huge amount of data related to the
inventorized letters and the people in question (senders and receivers) in a
consistent manner. During the annotation process, it was necessary to
distinguish 700 different people and to quickly look up whether and where these
people had previously been treated in scientific literature. It was also very
useful to have an archive to look up whether a certain transcription
had already been checked against the original yet. In addition, it was useful for
the substantive aspect of the study that the letters could be selected on the
basis of various characteristics (whether they were written by a secretary or by
Elizabeth herself; the colour of the sealing wax (for dating the letters)).
Finally, the database was used to create the index for the letters.
Example
Data structure
Discourse competence
Mike Hannay and Elena Martínez Caro are
investigating what it means to be a competent language user. Their study
focuses on discourse competence and particularly on how learners of English as a
second language begin sentences in written texts. Does the writer give
information that can be used to interpret his or her message at the start of the
sentence? In that case, they might put the subject first (
This book was a great success),
or circumstantial information about time and place (
Last week in
London we came up with another plan), or the opinion of the writer
(Fortunately, this didn’t end in a
disaster). Or is the start of the sentence used to make a link with the
preceding text? Then the sentence might contain elements that indicate a
contrast (
On
the other hand, we should also consider other options) or a
conclusion (
to
conclude,the results are unreliable). Questions in this study
include the following: How complex is the start of the sentence? Do language learners use all
patterns that are available in English? And what does this say about the
development of the language competence of the learners? Do certain differences
in the way that language learners start their sentences depend on their
mother tongue?
For this study they compiled a database of English texts
written by students with Dutch, Spanish and English as their native language
(some of the texts came from the ICLE corpus). A number of features were tagged
in every sentence in the database, including the inflected form and the meaning
of each element at the start of the sentence. The database makes it possible to
quickly see which structures are used at the start of sentences, for example.
It is also possible to do targeted searches for specific constructions, such as
“presentative” constructions and inverted constructions, which are often
problematic for language learners. In addition to searching the data, users can
also quickly count how often certain constructions occur, and whether or not
they occur in combination with other specific variables (e.g. an overview
of the frequency of certain sentence constructions in each mother tongue).
Sample input screen
More information on this study can be found in
Hannay & Caro (2008).
