Humanities Textual Databases Online: The Cases of TACT and FoxPro in the Digital Library

Humanities Textual Databases Online: The Cases of TACT
and FoxPro in the Digital Library

Stacy
Waters
Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and
Humanities University of Washington
stacy@u.washington.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Much of the work that humanities scholars do is, implicitly or explicitly, the
preparation of textual material as a database. On the one hand, almost any
descriptively tagged text (or text prepared with editing software that allows
the export of tagged files) is, implicitly, a flat, textual database. On the
other hand, the use of proprietary database software to organize textual
materials makes this connection explicit. The advantage of texts in databases is
that they may be queried and searched to reveal information about the text which
may be difficult to obtain in a more traditional manner.
Increasingly, the resources prepared by scholars in one or another database
format for their own restricted use are finding their way onto the Internet,
where they may be accessed by the larger scholarly community. Many people in the
possession of such resources, however, are perplexed about how to go about
linking them to the WEB.
I propose to organize a poster session that will display two examples of textual
databases, one flat and the other relational, that have been created at the
Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH) at
the University of Washington to be accessible over the Internet. The poster
session will illustrate the processes whereby existing databases may be made
available online. The methods described are generally applicable and can be
utilized by lots of scholars.