Managing AUTOTYP Data: Design Principles and Implementation

This data management use case describes AUTOTYP, a large-scale research program with goals in both quantitative and qualitative typology. It was launched in 1996 by Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols; however, individual data collection began much earlier. AUTOTYP is one of the oldest typological databases still in use and continuously developed for almost twenty-five years. Although the growth of the database proceeded uninterruptedly, several bursts of intensive data collection are associated with a number of research projects.

The aim of this chapter is twofold. In section 2, we outline some fundamental design principles of AUTOTYP. Section 3 illustrates the implementation of these principles with one module of the AUTOTYP database, namely the grammatical relations module. This section will be of use to readers who plan to start their own typological database or who are already working on one. Section 4 is aimed at users and data consumers. It describes how to access the data and provides a brief overview of several use cases and research questions that have been asked with AUTOTYP.