Using FileMaker Pro to get the most from your corpus data

This presentation provides a basic introduction to the database programme FileMaker Pro. I will use examples from my research for which I used Corpus Query Language in Sketch Engine to retrieve importance markers from BASE lectures which I then stored and annotated with FileMaker Pro. Although this programme is mainly used by businesses and so probably less familiar to corpus researchers than, for example, Access, it offers many features which greatly facilitate and speed up the processing of corpus data for research or materials development.
Corpus concordances can be imported into a FileMaker database, where you can give them multiple tags and quickly and easily generate quantified instances from your corpus using any tag or a combination of tags. For example, the programme allowed me to classify concordances of importance markers into lexicogrammatical patterns, interactive and textual orientation types, component parts (e.g. verbs, Subjects), discipline, study level, co-occurring discourse markers etc. In this way, it took only a few seconds to generate and quantify instances of importance markers which, for instance, have the pattern ‘V clause’, contain ‘remember’ and co-occur with the discourse marker ‘but’. The programme thus allows you to examine and quantify the same data in a variety of ways and to retrieve only those instances you are interested in. This has considerable potential for facilitating the retrieval of corpus evidence for materials design and research.