Database Design, Annotation and Archiving with SayMore

Sarah Ruth Moeller

Location: Business Building 241
Week 2: Monday, June 23-Thursday, June 26
Period 3: 2:15-3:45 pm

This workshop teaches students to design and implement a database management system (DBMS) for organizing, storing, managing and retrieving the kinds of information typically arising from fieldwork. These include primary data like media recordings, photographs and fieldnotes; value‐added data like annotated transcripts and lexica; and metadata about people and places. Students will learn how DBMSs work through a combination of lectures and hands‐on coursework using a sample set of hypothetical fieldwork data. This workshop is aimed at newcomers and assumes very little previous experience. 

Topics will include: Survey of database systems in linguistic applications; Relative merits of different DBMS (Libre Office Base, Filemaker Pro, Access, etc); Abstracting from field material to database structures; Exercises will include designing flat and relational databases and will be illustrated using FileMaker Pro.