Databases in Humanities and Social Sciences

Applications of Databases to Humanities and Social Sciences

Introduction

Sociology

Demography

DB Design

Introduction

You are on the personal site of Marc Grange.
Information appearing in these pages concerns all people wanting to apply and use the techniques of databases. Various examples are taken from the field of Social Sciences, but the SQL language training and the databases design method presented hereafter, relate to all the fields that imply an effective management of data.
Practitioner, developer and teacher, I use and teach databases for more than 20 years.

Prerequisites

Knowledge on Databases design, the relational data model and SQL language are essential to follow this presentation. The reader not having required knowledge, but wishing to approach these various fields, can refer, in these pages, at the columns :

DB Design	Elementary concepts for databases design Book - Schaum's outline of fundamentals of relational databases
SQL	SQL Interactive training Book - Schaum's outline of fundamentals of SQL programming

Objective

The aim of this presentation is to show some interesting applications of Databases in Humanities and Social Sciences. The use of a data model to structure information, here the relational model, allows then to work with SQL language for the extraction and production of relevant information relating to the studied field. This "generic" approach, which uses the properties of DBMS (DataBases Management Systems), avoids the development of specific application software developments.

Four examples, in connexion with Humanities and Social Sciences , will be successively presented :

*- In Sociology*	: Treatment of surveys
*- In Demography*	: Modeling of relationships
*- In Psychology*	: Relations of affinities
*- In Geography*	: Networks modeling

Each example will be treated according to the following steps :

Presentation of the data connected to the problem : construction of the data dictionary.
Structuring of information : production of the diagram of data.
Presentation of questions representative of the studied field.
Interactive treatement of questions, on a "test" database, using SQL language.

Practical application

To practically apply and use, on a real system, the concepts of design and use of databases (SQL) presented in these pages, see the functionalities of the IBEasy+ software.