For everyone out there who believes that science (i.e. the methods, data and results) should be more open, hear the good news: You are not alone! A whole series of papers published in the worlds most highly ranked journals is on your side – or are they?
Duncal Hull compiled an excellent list of resources.
My personal favorite is the following:
Sometimes you would like to play an audio to your participants in an online survey. But not every type of audio is working perfectly in standard online survey software and sometimes you would just like to link to your audio data on your own server. Here you could use the Flash Mp3-Player.
There are different Versions of the player available. For my tasks even the mini player was sufficient so far. How to present an audio online with this player (and so showing it in an online survey as well) is described here.
Pro:
It is really easy and the given examples are very helpful.
The code generator on the website is an additional helpful tool.
Con:
From my point of view there are no cons.
The analysis of geospatial information is currently a big trend in medicine and public health. Even though some may want to convince you that this can only be achieved with the latest and most expensive software, I am not convinced. First, analysis of spatial data dates back to at least 1856 when John Snow investigated Cholera-outbreaks in London. Second, as I try to demonstrate today some very interesting analysis and data can be retreived essentially for free.
While I have already made a post on how to plot freely availible geospatial data in R in a previous post , this post will show you how to use Python to access the google maps database and gather e.g. travel times and distances to/from various locations with known zip-codes.
Please note that this is my first Python skript. So it will certainly not meet the high standards you might have developed based on previous posts. On the up-side, you will get the baby step instructions.
Update 2011/07/03: A much more user-friendly version of the script that adds guis to select a proper csv-file, containing start and end-adressess and to store the results can be found here. If you are afraid of Python, you can use the stand-alone Mac app “batchtimer” that basically contains all files necessary from here.
Flashlight is such an example, it is an open-source, web-based software package that can be used to collect continuous and non-obtrusive measures of users’ information acquisition behavior. Flashlight offers a cost effective and rapid way to collect data on how long and how often a participant reviews information in different areas of visual stimuli. It provides the functionality of other open source process tracing tools, like MouselabWeb, and adds the capability to present any static visual stimulus.
Flashlight is based on the idea that the original stimulus is overlaid with a blurred version. Around the mouse cursor a ‘focus area’ reverses this blurring and shows the original, un-blurred version of the stimulus. Using the mouse a participant can explorer the stimulus easily. Length and frequency of fixation are calculated from the collected data and can be downloaded for further analysis from the available scripts.
ZIS is an electronic manual containing information about a great number of questionnaires used to measure attitudes and behaviours in the field of social sciences. The program supports MS Windows 3.x, Windows 95, 97, 2000, NT, XP, and 7 (32 and 64 bit).
That’s what the developers say about it:
PsychoPy is an open-source application to allow the presentation of stimuli and collection of data for a wide range of neuroscience, psychology and psychophysics experiments. It’s a free, powerful alternative to Presentation™ or e-Prime™, written in Python (a free alternative to Matlab™ ).
Cons:
phpPanelAdmin’s features to set up and administer an on-line panel include:
- create a panel sign-up form from a template
- automatic set-up of the panel database
- search individuals or groups of panellists by a single search criterion or a combination of search criteria
- view, modify, and delete panellists’ data
- delete and clone variables
- draw random samples
- send e-mail to samples or individual panellists
- export panellists’ profile data
- panel statistics at a glance
- identification of duplicates
- create and manage e-mail templates
- execute user-defined SQL-commands
- help
The use of phpPanelAdmin is described in: Göritz, A. S. (2009). Building and managing an online panel with phpPanelAdmin. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 1177-1182.
The full text of this article can be downloaded here. Accompanying material can be downloaded here. Download phpPanelAdmin along with the documentation here.
It parses the input from any HTML form, then it automatically creates a MySQL database with one table in it containing columns that are named according to the variables that were submitted through the HTML form. Thus, Generic HTML Form Processor relieves users from writing a script that parses form input and writes it into a database as well as from setting up a database.
You can use Generic HTML Form Processor for one-page studies, multiple-page studies, with input validation, random assignment of participants to experimental conditions, skip patterns, and password-protection. For details, see the examples and links at the bottom of this page.
The use of Generic HTML Form Processor is described in: Göritz, A. S. & Birnbaum, M. H. (2005). Generic HTML Form Processor: A versatile PHP Script to save Web-collected data into a MySQL database. Behavior Research Methods, 37(4), 703-710.
The full text of this article can be downloaded here. Accompanying material can be downloaded here. The program can be downloaded here.
Sometimes you would like to show a video to your participants in an online survey. But not every type of video is working in standard online survey software. Here you could just use Flowplayer.
How to present a video online (and thus showing it in an online survey as well) is described here.
Pro:
It is really easy and the given examples are very helpful.
Con:
A more powerful version of Flowplayer is sadly not free and open source. But for me the basis version provided enough functions.
Praat is a multifunctional tool for speech analysis and synthesis. You can use it for transcriptions, signal manipulations (e.g. editing, altering stimuli duration or pitch manipulations), recognition experiments (e.g., yes-no decisions, but no latencies), acoustic-phonetic measurements. It produces nice spectrogram- and other plots. Praat comes with an implemented scripting language which allows automatized processing of stimuli.
However, Praat’s handling is absolutely non-intuitive for windows users and/or no-programmers and the massive manual is not too helpful for beginners. Thus, a brief introduction by a colleague will save a lot of time and effort.
(If you want to use it for annotations only, ELAN may be the better option)
Visit this page for beginners’ tutorials. For more help, join this yahoo user-group.
If you need auditiv material in a study, Audacity is your software to record or edit your stimuli. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and other operating systems. Besides general functions (such as cuting, deleting or coping parts,…) there are also different special effects:
List of features: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features
Download Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/?lang=en