alexisgarland
commented
6 years ago Just trying to think about the spreadsheet more from a data sense. It may be that a user would have to toggle on or off 'chronology' mode right when setting up, and that in chronology mode, each analysis is saved to a separate sheet. Having an unpredictable number of start/stop times added to each row of data would be a huge mess and unhelpful. Going to do a little bit more thinking about/investigating of that layout.
This is something that was discussed when the coder was first built, but not added yet. Has now been requested again more than once. Rather than just counting/timing events overall, it would be very useful to have exact start and stop times of each timed event as well as the time of counted events - i.e. not just that a bird pecked 60 times within the 120s trial, but that it pecked at 21.2s into the trial, 25.8s, etc. or that it flapped it's wings starting at 16.5s and stopped at 21.6s (for a timed event), and then again from 54.6 to 71.3s.
This would likely mean implementing multiple sub-features:
While creating experimental settings, or perhaps better at the start of each trial analysis, a user should be able to check a box and determine whether they want to use "absolute" time (i.e. counting from 0s at the start of the actual video footage - this is rarely what people will want), or "relative" time (i.e. the user selects a 0s point in the video footage, and chronology is recorded relative to that point - this is much more often the case, as the video footage will already be running and then the real "start" of the trial is when a door opens or an animal enters an area).
As mentioned above, for "relative" chronology, a user would have to be able to select a 0-point on the video - i.e. scroll to a point and mark that as 0. Both counted and timed events would be recorded chronologically in relation to that zero point (i.e. crowing 10 seconds after that point, not the beginning of the original footage).
The spreadsheet will get more complicated; it would need to have start and stop times for each timed event within a trial analysis, as well as count event points in time.
A visual representation of the timers/counters and recorded events, using the colors assigned to the buttons - scrolling along multiple lines as the user is coding - would be very handy for the coder to have an overview of where events are falling on the chronology in reference to each other.
I need to think a little bit more - and this leads to another enhancement - but we may want to be able to link specific timers/counters with each other, so that you are specifically referencing counted events within a certain timed event, etc. If the enhancement above is made, this can be done post-hoc with the data itself in most or all cases, so that would be secondary, and take a little more thinking.