Constructing an ELICIT trial database using Python scripts and Excel macros

Please contact Jimmie McEver () or Danielle Martin () if you have any questions or suggestions. These instructions utilize the files in the ELICIT examples files folder that may be downloaded from the ELICIT User Community website.

  1. If you do not have Python, download latest version from python.org and install.
  2. Place all transaction logs from the trials you wish to populate your data table into a folder. Ensure no superfluous text apart from the transaction log has been inserted into the logs.
  3. Open the ELICIT log extractor.py file and edit as necessary.
  4. Start python and run the ELICIT log extractor.py script.
  5. Open the grade ids.py file and edit as necessary, ensuring that the answerkeys.txt and factoidsetused.txt files are in place and updated to reflect your runs.
  6. Run the grade ids.py script.
  7. StartExcel and open gradedids.txt (the file created by the grade ids.py script) from the File menu. Walk through the appropriate import options for a semicolon-delimited file. Be sure to have Excel read the “when” columns as text-formatted fields, else Excel will try to convert some of the answers to date format, with mixed results.
  8. Still in Excel, open the shareinfo...txt file you wish to use from the File menu. Walk through the import options for a semicolon-delimited file.
  9. Still in Excel, open the ELICIT data analysis sheet.xls file.
  10. Select the metadata worksheet, and edit it to include the metadata from your trials.
  11. Paste the worksheet you created in Step 7 (related to IDs) into the IDs sheet of the ELICIT data analysis sheet.xls workbook, replacing the data you currently have in that worksheet.
  12. Paste the worksheet you created in Step 8 (relating to sharing data) into the data sheet of the ELICIT data analysis sheet.xls workbook, replacing the data you currently have in that worksheet.
  13. While in Excel, press Alt+F8 (or use the appropriate drop-down menus) to open the Macro dialog box.
  14. Select and run the color_code macro, which will color code the IDs sheet to facilitate grading.
  15. Grade all of the answers in the IDs worksheet. Note that the worksheet includes the answers from the answer key.
  16. Once the IDs worksheet is graded and the metadata sheet is updated, press Alt+F8 again and run the Complete_analysis_sheet macro. Metadata information and ID scoring will be added to the data worksheet.
  17. Save the workbook under a new name.
  18. Select the data worksheet and save it as a text (tab delimited) file. You may now import it into most statistical analysis and visualization packages (note that some packages will allow you to directly load the Excel format files, so this last step may not be necessary).