This short note describes a computer system for analyzing
data sets acquired in the course of ethnological studies. The
system accepts, as an input, any set of data whose individual
constituents consist of several attribute items. This type of data
set is frequently encountered in studies of material culture. Several
metric and/or nominal attributes are defined and measured for all
samples under investigation.
The major function of the system for this kind of data set is to
depict frequency distribution of attributes. Measurement of the
frequency distribution may be conditioned: The measurement
may be made on only the samples that meet certain conditions
imposed on some attribute items. By examining the attribute
frequency distribution conditioned by other attributes, we can
estimate inter-relationships among these attributes. Other principal
functions of the system are linear regression analysis, correlation
analysis and retrieval from the data set. All processing proceeds
in man-machine interactive fashion and results are displayed
graphically.
The functions and use of the system are illustrated by application
to a data collection on Japanese basketry.