Here you will find a couple of other tools that I have developed to help people streamline their use of text in their research. These are not particularly good programs and are (relatively) old and poorly coded.

Nevertheless, if you have comments or questions (or especially if you find a bug!), feel free to send me an e-mail and I will do my best to answer any questions that you may have. If you use any of the software on this page for your research, acknowledgement via citations are appreciated, but certainly not necessary.

Ye Olde Token Converter

This little program does an admirable job of converting a large amount of Shakespearean language to modern English. It doesn’t cover 100% of this type of language, but it’s probably 90% there:

Download Ye Olde Token Converter (version 0.2.2 alpha)

It works well on other writing from that time period as well, although I have built it so that you can add additional conversions, as spelling / writing conventions were highly idiosyncratic during this time period. This program could be easily used for other purposes as well. For example, if you have a list of common misspellings or fixes that you commonly apply to text prior to analysis, you can just paste it into the conversion box to save yourself the time / energy of doing the replacements regularly in a manual fashion. As a bonus feature, it can generate random Shakespearean insults because… why not? Huzzah.

Guided Write

Guided Write is designed to be a very simple, straight-forward text-capturing program for use with human participants. It is designed for the sole purpose of functioning as a guided writing task, where the participants are prompted to write about something, then do so for a given amount of time. This program was designed with the intent of being used in a laboratory setting, although it could be used in other settings as well. The instructions are rather straight-forward:

Download and install Guided Write

Go to the Guided Write install folder (or go to the “Output” folder and then just go up one directory)

In this folder, you will find a Instructions-1.txt and Instructions-2.txt. The number after the hyphen (-) indicates Condition number. You may create as many of these text files as you would like to have for writing conditions. If you are doing a between-subjects manipulation with three conditions, for example, you can create Instructions-3.txt and put the instructions in your new file for a third condition. Your writing prompt will be present onscreen both prior to and during the writing task to facilitate adequate responses on the part of the participants.

Run Guided Write, filling in the appropriate information in each box.

Press the “F10” key to begin the writing task, allowing the participant to take it from there. This was done to help prevent impatient and/or inquisitive participants from starting the writing task before the experimenter intends to do so.

When finished, the program will output two files for the participant, both named after their participant number. One file is the actual content of their writing, while the other is a log of their information (the information typed in at startup, along with date and time information). Voila!

ConverSplitter

NOTE ABOUT CONVERSPLITTER: This software is old and pretty awful. Instead of using this, you should check out ConverSplitter Plus!, located here:

https://conversplitter.ryanb.cc

ConverSplitter is designed to help you split text files that contain dyadic conversations. This saves the time and effort of manually separating text files by speaker. The instructions are as follows:

Take the file(s) that contain the conversation(s) in and save in .txt format.

Download and run ConverSplitter.exe

In the “Speaker 1 Tag” box, type in the tag that is used to delimit the first person in the conversation. Capitalization is important, and it must be exactly as it appears in the conversation file.

Do the exact same thing for “Speaker 2 Tag”. For example, you might have “Subject 213:” in the Speaker 1 Tag box and “Subject 214:” in the Speaker 2 Tag box. Make sure that you don’t have any extra spaces at the beginning or end of the tags or it might not work correctly.

Click the “Select File To Split…” button and find the .txt file that has the conversation in it.

Click the “Split File…” button. It will ask you where you want the output files to be placed.

ConverSplitter should output two .txt files, each named the same as the corresponding Speaker Tag.
That’s all that there is to it. Right now, this software is in a very early form, so it is optimized for conversation files that follow the following example format:

Example 1:
123: Hello, how are you today?
5431: I’m fine, thanks for asking!
123: So, do you think that you did well on your exam?
5431: I studied very carefully, so I believe that I did very well.
etc….

Example 2:
Person A: Knock knock.
Person B: Who’s there?
Person A: Doris.
Person B: Doris who?
Person A: Doris locked, that’s why I’m knocking!

Changelog

2014-01-24 — Uploaded Ye Olde Token Converter.

2012-11-08 — Uploaded Guided Write 1.1.0 and ConverSplitter 0.8.0 beta.