Relational Data Modelling of Textual Corpora: The Skaldic Project and its Extensions

Skaldic poetry is a highly complex textual phenomenon both in terms of the intricacy of the poetry and its contextual environment. Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications such as that of the Text Encoding Initiative provide a means of semantic representation of some of these complexities. XML, however, has limitations in representing semantic relationships that do not conform to the tree model. This article presents the relational data model as a way of representing the structure of skaldic texts and their contextual environment. The relational data model raises both problems and possibilities for this type of project. The main problem addressed here is the representation of the syntagmatic structures of texts in a data model that is not intrinsically ordered. The advantages are also explored, including networked data editing and management, quantitative linguistic analysis, dynamic representation of the data, and the ability to extend the structure and reuse data for related projects without creating redundancy.