Category Archives: Software

Easy online audio player: Mp3 player

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.

ZIS: Sozialwissenschaftliche Skalen/ social sciences questionnaires

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).

Audiotranskription mit f4

Using f4, you can easily create a transcript of your audio- or videorecordings. f4 can be used via keyboard (even within MS Word), can slow down playback speed, can automatically jump back for a few seconds, and can (automatically) create time stamps/ text blocks. f4 is available for MS Windows and MacOS X.

Merkmalsvisualisierung mit Biplot/ Visualizing data with Biplot

Biplot visualizes distribution of data within a twodimensional coordinate system. In contrast to the usual visualization, biplot shows how many data points are located at the same spot. Additionally, a filter variable can be created in oder to change the color of certain values. Biplot can be used on any operating system that supports Java.

Beurteilerübereinstimmung mit ReCal/ Calculating Intercoder Reliability with ReCal

After categorization of data, it is sensible to calculate intercoder reliability. This can be easily done using the web serviceReCal.

The only action required to use this service is to upload a CSV-file containing the codes. There are three different variants of the program: one for two coders with data at nominal scale level, one for three or more coders with data at nominal scale level, and one for any number of coders with data at ordinal, interval, or ratio scale level. The program is described in the following article:

Freelon, Deen G. (2010). ReCal: Intercoder Reliability Calculation as a Web Service. International Journal of Internet Science,5(1), 20-33.

phpPanelAdmin

phpPanelAdmin is an open source tool for the management of on-line (access) panels or similar sampling lists or communities. phpPanelAdmin is free software placed under GNU General Public Licence. phpPanelAdmin works with PHP and MySQL, both of which are free.

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.

Generic HTML Form Processor

Generic HTML Form Processor is a free and open-source program for facilitating data collection with HTML forms.

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.

Goodbye Powerpoint – Slides with LaTeX and beamer

A couple of weeks ago I presented my first presentation with LaTeX. It took some time longer, and especially as the deadline was approaching I was very close to switching back to powerpoint. But now I am glad I didn’t, because I rediscovered the ABC of what I like about LaTeX approach.

  1. Automaticity: Once you learn LaTeX, you don’t have to make a reference list or table of contents
  2. Beauty: The beamer-themes just look really really good. They give the right amount of information on every slide, and leave ample space for your contents.
  3. Compatibility: As you are presenting PDFs you can be sure, that they will look similar across different computers.

Here is a minimal example of a presentation with table of contents, several slides, animation, images, references, and Umlauts. Of course, I am not the first to use the beamer class, I particularly like this introductory site because it has many examples for the different themes, and has both an English and German version. You will find many more if you just google for specific commands (e.g. “\usetheme{Warsaw}”). In any case, I hope you find the example useful, all files necessary to adapt it to your own needs can be downloaded here.

[de]Vor einigen Wochen habe ich meine erste Präsentation mit LaTeX gehalten. Die Vorbereitung hat einige Zeit länger gebraucht, und vor allem als sich die Deadline näherte, stand ich ganz kurz davor, zurück zu Powerpoint zu wechseln. Jetzt bin ich froh, nicht gewechselt zu haben, weil ich das ABC bezüglich was ich an LaTeX mag wiederentdeckt habe:

  1. Automaticity: Wenn du einmal LaTeX gelernt hast, brauchst du kein Literatur- oder Inhaltsverzeichnis mehr zu machen
  2. Beauty: Das Folienlayout sieht wirklich wirklich schön aus. Es wird die richtige Menge an Informationen auf jeder Folie geliefert, wobei ausreichend Platz für deine Inhalte gelassen wird.
  3. Compatibility: Wenn du PDFs präsentierst, kannst du dir sicher sein, dass sie auf verschiedenen Computern trotzdem alle ähnlich aussehen.

Here ist ein kleines Beispiel mit Inhaltsverzeichnis, einigen Folien, Animationen, Bildern, Referenzen und Umlauten. Natürlich bin ich nicht der erste, der beamer class nutzt: besonders mag ich diese (this) Einführungsseite, weil sie viele Beispiele für verschiedene Themen hat und sowohl englische, als auch deutsche Versionen. Noch viele weiter Beispiele findest du, wenn du für spezifische Kommandos googlest (z.B. “\usetheme{Warsaw}”). In jedem Fall hoffe ich, dass du die Beispiele hilfreich findest. Alle Dateien, welche nötig sind um es an deine eigenen Bedürfnisse anzupassen können here downgeloaded werden./de]

Reproducible Research = LaTeX + R + Jabref

[en]The concept of reproducible research with it’s core idea of being able to reproduce all figures, tables, and results in a manuscript is fascinating. The best way to implement this is by using R in combination with latex. However, it takes a while to get everything into place. There is some information about sweave on the authors’ webpage and  several others give great examples (here, and here).  However, these do not include citations, and as someone who needs Umlauts I also spent some time to find out how to include these. In the following I describe my final set of files that can be used to write small and not so small tutorials in statistics. All of which look like this example. Any comments are much aprecciated:

Overview

Stuff I installed: Texshop and Jabref. For both I set the standard encoding to UTF8.

Four files need to be in the same folder (“/temp/):

  1. the master-file that contains the text, R-code-chunks, and citations
  2. the bibtex-file that contains the references in bibtex-format
  3. Sweave.sty
  4. the R-skript that starts the sweave command and compiles the resulting Latex-document using pdflatex.

You can download the whole folder here.

Continue reading

Easy online video player: Flowplayer

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.

G*Power 3

Once in a while one has to determine the power of an experiment, the effect size, or the adequate sample size. Nearly all statistical programs allow to determine the effect size of an experiment and/or its power. But why powering up SPSS, when a small tool would do as well if not better?

G*Power 3 offers different types of statistical power analysis. Typically one uses a-priori or post-hoc.  G*Power 3 is available for Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows XP/Vista. It has been described in

Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175-191.

It can be downloaded here.

Scientific sound analysis – Praat

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.