Generating ELAN format
The asc2elan script uses the eyetracker's ASCII format output to generate data files that can be read by ELAN, a tool that can be used for further annotation
Overview
This page describes the asc2elan script, which converts the eyetracker's ASCII format output to a format that can be read by ELAN, a tool that can be used for further annotation.
Basic Usage
Double click on asc2elan in windows and fill in the boxes, or type the following at a command prompt:
asc2elan serverfile.asc clientfile.asc elanfile.eaf
Serverfile and clientfile need to be from the same experiment. A GDF file named elanfile.gdf will be created in the same directory as the ELAN file.
Assumptions
The asc2elan conversion uses JASTAnalyser.exe to generate the GDF file and gdf2elan.xsl to convert this into an ELAN file, so both of these files need to be accessable. The default configuration puts these in the directory above asc2elan, see the asc2elan.bat file to see how to make sure asc2elan can find these files.
The first step of the conversion is to reformat the output data to assign each part with a unique ID. To avoid memory issues, the conversion files are stored in the temporary directory of the machine, so make sure there's enough disk space there to avoid potential problems. Alternatively, the reformatasc program can be used to manually reformat the data and JASTAnalyser can be run directly on those files. See the relevant documentation for those programs for more details.
The JASTAnalyser conversion uses the experiment XML files to setup the screen, so these need to be in the search path, along with their DTD files.
Recommended Usage
- Copy all XML and DTD files into the JASTAnalyser directory.
- Copy the ASC files into the sample_data directory.
- From the JASTAnalyser directory type:
dist\asc2elan sample_data\serverfile.asc sample_data\clientfile.asc sample_data\elanfile.eaf
