Abstract
The data management strategies implemented by the OCHRE database platform were motivated, in part, by software engineering principles, and there are many parallels between the data structures built into OCHRE and the structures and techniques commonly used by software developers, resulting in a happy confluence of theory and practice. This chapter offers a more conceptual glimpse of the rationale behind OCHRE’s data model and reflects on the interplay between the process and the product; that is, the process of OCHRE development itself, and the products that result from OCHRE data management. Principles and practices that guide and inspire an item-based database design, place OCHRE in good company computationally, solidly in the mainstream, while it stands apart from the crowd.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Other popular modern programming languages like C++ and Python are based on the object-oriented programming paradigm.
- 2.
- 3.
Kay (1993).
- 4.
The OOP model contrasts with traditional “structured programming” (e.g., languages like C, Fortran, Pascal, and PL/1) where imperative statements determine logical control flow; see An Introduction to Structured Programming (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205654). Structured programming, itself, was in reaction to “spaghetti code” (yes, what you would imagine), where the “goto” statement is used freely; see https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/spaghetti-code. OOP also contrasts with “functional programming” (e.g., languages like LISP), a style in which computation is broken down into single-purpose functions that act on the data; see https://github.com/readme/guides/functional-programming-basics.
- 5.
- 6.
The PTM format, also known as Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) was developed at the Hewlett Packard Laboratory and published by Tom Malzbender, Dan Gelb, and Hans Wolters in November 2001.
- 7.
See “Fort. 0117-002 Reverse 2, ptm” at https://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/org/ochre/624d183a-08c2-4649-99b1-588581ea9d86.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
A primary key is the unique identifier of a record in a table (ibid., p. 380). Of course, in OCHRE, items are not stored in tables.
- 12.
By way of comparison, Microsoft Excel uses a strategy similar in spirit. A table column “Part of speech” in which the word “Verb” was listed 800 times would represent the character string “Verb” only once, but would point to it from 800 instances. This is clearly seen in the XML structure of the .xslx format. The difference, however, is that Excel is a table-based format, not an item-based format. Changing “Verb” to “Verbe” will change only the affected table cell (instantiating a new character string), not every instance of it.
- 13.
CHD Volume P (Güterbock and Hoffner 1997, pp. 18–40).
- 14.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 15.
E. E. Cummings has been noted elsewhere as having used recursion as a “para-grammatical device” to “signal the idea of juxtaposition of parts so as to bring about continuous increment toward a remote whole” (p. 68 John B. Lord, Para-Grammatical Structure in a Poem of E. E. Cummings) but we find it striking in this poem, “i carry your heart with me,” where he uses recursive structures in conjunction with a reference to a tree. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1316795.
Citations
Codd, E. F. (1970). A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Communications of the ACM, 13(6), 377–387.
Güterbock, H. G., & Hoffner, H. A. (Eds.). (1997). The Hittite dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago: Volume P. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: What’s special about it? Cognition, 95(2), 201–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.08.004
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schloen, S.R., Prosser, M.C. (2023). An Item-Based Approach: Rationalize. In: Database Computing for Scholarly Research. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46696-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46696-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-46694-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-46696-0
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)