A tool to analyze audiovisual experiment recordings and transcripts Jens Lammert jens.lammert@st.ovgu.de 2012 2013 Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg The following document illustrates how to install, configure and use the Experiment Player to analyze experiments.

https://github.com/rhaberkorn/experiment-player

http://sourceforge.net/projects/exp-player/

To install the Experiment Player on a Windows-based operating system, the GTK+ 2 widget toolkit must first be downloaded and installed. A convenient GTK+ installer can be downloaded from the "GTK+ for Windows Runtime Environment Installer" project page. It is only necessary to install the GTK+ runtime. Additional themes may be installed as well - but the default GTK+ theme should be sufficient. Precompiled Windows 32-bit binaries of the Experiment Player itself are available as ZIP archives from the Sourceforge project page. The ZIP archive merely has to be extracted somewhere. Afterwards the included experiment-player.exe can be executed. All library dependencies except GTK+ are included in the ZIP archive.

To install the Experiment Player on a Linux-based operating system, it first has to be built from source. It can either be built from a local Git repository clone, or from a source code package that can be downloaded from the project's download archive on Sourceforge. In either case, further build instructions are given in the included INSTALL file.

After startup there will be two windows, a player window and a data window. They are explained in the following sections.

Player Window after startup The image above depicts the player window after startup. No experiment is yet opened in the application, so several controls are greyed out. Experiments can be opened via the File menu or the Quick Open menu. The process of opening experiments via the Quick Open menu is explained later on. The remaining interface components are self-explanatory.

Data Window after startup The image above depicts the data window after startup. The data window is used to display additional information of an experiment. This information is time-dependant and synchronized with other time-dependant data, like the current video position. If the time is changed in one component, it changes in all the other ones as well. The current implementation is able to display an experiment transcript (in the Transcript view area). The transcript view is divided into a left part showing the wizard's text contributions and a right part showing the proband's text contributions. The different experiment phases are displayed hierachically in the Transcript navigation area. Transcripts may also be searched and highlighted but this feature is explained later on. Furthermore the look of the Transcript View may be customized after loading an experiment by right-clicking the Transcript view. Foreground and background colors, text alignment and scroll direction can be changed this way. The playback position of the experiment may be influenced in the following ways: by clicking or scrolling the slider in the data window with the mouse wheel, by scrolling the transcript widgets with the mouse wheel, by using the transcript view's scroll bar, or by double-clicking an entry in the navigation hierarchy. Single clicking an entry in the navigation hierarchy mereley highlights that part of the transcript by the shading the transcript view's background.

A video recording of an experiment and its correspondig transcript file are considered as an experiment. A video is an AVI or MP4 file while transcript files are special XML applications generated from FOLKER XML transcripts. Transcript XML files must conform to the session.dtd schema shipped with the Experiment Player application. Experiment's files can be opened separately or by using the Quick Open feature. Empty Quick Open menu Quick Open can be performed using the Quick Open menu. The menu has items for all experiments found in a selected directory. The directory may be selected using the Choose Directory... menu item. Experiment files with identical basenames (file name without extension) are listed as single menu items. For instance, if the directory contains two files 20101117.xml and 20101117.mp4, the menu will look like: When an experiment item is activated in the menu, the corresponding experiment files are loaded (replacing any already opened experiment). The configured location of the Quick Open directory persists after application restarts.

To analyze the dialog between proband and wizard the Experiment-Player offers a feature to search for text patterns in the dialog and for highlighting the matches in the transcript. After loading an experiment via the Quick Open menu, the dialog between proband and wizard will be displayed in the transcript widgets. The highlighting feature can be used for both the wizard's and the proband's part of the dialog independently of each other. By entering a search expression in the text boxes for interactive highlighting of the transcript will be highlighted on the fly. The syntax of these search expressions and their exact semantics are described in the following sections.

By default, if the Markup toggles are inactive, search expressions are interpreted as regular expressions. The system will iterate all text fragments (dialog contributions with distinct timestamps) and tries to match the regular expression against them. All the matches will be highlighted. By default they will be formatted bold, but this may be changed in the configuration file. Regular Expressions are case-insensitive so both lower-case and upper-case character will match both lower and upper case text. For more information about the Regular Expression syntax supported by the program, have a look at the glib documentation for Perl compatible Regular Expression. All constructs are supported, except captures. An icon next to the pattern entry box signals well-formedness of the entered search expression.

By default a search term will be regarded as Regular Expression and matches found will be highlighted bold. However if the Markup toggle is activated the input expression will be regarded as a Format Expression which is a combination of Regular Expression and Pango Markup. Pango Markup is a simple HTML-like formatting markup language. Just like with plain regular expressions, all text fragments are iterated and the format expression is matched against each of them. The markup does not matter for matching but only the regular expressions contained within the markup tags. For every match in each of the text fragments, the markup will be applied to all of the text matched by the regular expression within the corresponding markup tag. So for instance the format expression ABC]]>, case-insensitively matches against all occurrences of ABC, formatting all the characters bold and only B in italics. The following screenshot shows a transcript with all consonants followed by vowels highlighted (expression [^aeiou][aeiou]]]>): For more information about Pango Markup, please read the Pango Markup documentation.

Format Files are files which contain a sequence of format expressions. So any collection of format expressions for analyzing dialogs can be saved in those files and used with different experiments. ABC [^aeiou][aeiou]]]> Format Files are loaded in a similar manner as experiments when using the Quick Open feature. First a directory containing format files must be chosen via the Choose Directory... item in the Formats menu of the data window. "Formats" menu A format file may then be selected via the drop-down boxes below the transcript view area. The first entry of those boxes is always empty and may be selected to disable format file processing. The following screenshot shows sample.fmt being selected: If a format file is selected, for each text fragment every format expression in the format file is evaluated (highlighting all matches as described earlier). At last, any interactively entered search expression (plain regular expression or format expression) is evaluated for each text fragment after the format expressions in the currently selected Format File. All formattings are applied cumulatively. Where subsequent styles cannot be merged, later ones overwrite earlier ones. For instance, when loading the following format file, the word program is formatted blue instead of red: programm programm]]> The syntax of format files is as follows: Format Files have the file extension fmt. Every line will be regarded as a distinct Format Expression. Leading whitespace characters are ignored. A line beginning with # is ignored completely (comment line). Empty lines are ignored. Incorrect lines will cause an error message.

The Experiment Player's configuration file is located in different locations depending on the platform: Under Linux, it will be located in the user's data directory as specified in the XDG Base Directory Specification (usually $HOME/.local/share/.experiment-player). Under Windows, it will be located in the local application data directory (usually C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data\.experiment-player). The syntax of the configuration file is documented in the glib documentation. Sometimes it is useful to edit the configuration file directly in order to tweak options that are not accessible via the Experiment Player GUI. The following table lists such configuration keys:

Key	Description	Format
Default-Format-Font	The font used for highlighting plain regular expressions.	See Pango Font description
Default-Format-Text-Color	The foreground color used for highlighting plain regular expressions.	An RGB color specification such as #FF0000 or a color name such as red.
Default-Format-BG-Color	The background color used for highlighting plain regular expressions.	An RGB color specification such as #FF0000 or a color name such as red.