CowLog 2.0: Users manual

Matti Pastell
matti.pastell@helsinki.fi

Citing CowLog

To cite CowLog in publications use:
Hänninen, L. & Pastell, M. 2009. CowLog: Open source software for coding behaviors from digital video. Behavior Research Methods. 41(2), 472-476.

Setting up a project

General Settings - tab

You will need to define a project before you can start coding. Choose "File -> New Project" from the menu. You can define the name of the project and other basic information. Here is a description of less self explanatory fields:

Video directory. This is where CowLog will look for your video files by default.
Data directory.
Behavioral codes. Here you can define your ethogram. Write behaviors as comma separated list with behaviors for each class on a separate line. If you'll leave this empty CowLog will use the default numbered codes.

If your project uses modifiers check the Use modifiers check box and write the behaviors that have modifiers in the Codes with modifiers box as a comma sepated list (behaviors from all classes in the same list).

Video Player Settings - tab

You can use either MPlayer or VLC player as a video player.

MPlayer comes with CowLog Windows installations and can be installed on most Linux distributions trough the package manager and is avalaible as a binary for Mac OS X. You can also choose video driver for MPlayer if the default option doesn't work on your hardware.

VLC player needs to be installed separately on all platforms. Once VLC is installed CowLog should find it automatically.

Both video players should offer similar coding experience for video formats that they support. If you experience problems with your video format you can try changing the player.

Coding session

After you have defined you project you can start coding. Choose "File -> New Subject" to start coding. The name of the datafile will be formed from Subject and Start time fields. You can choose on or several videos using the Video file(s): button. If you choose several videos they will all be played at the same time.

Click OK and you should see the video opened and you can start coding. END the coding session using the stop-button. It will add end time and code to your datafile You should do this even if the video has ended before you press it. Code behaviors by pressing coding buttons with the mouse or by pressing alt+''underlined character'' from the keyboard. e.g to code behavior 1 from column 1 press ''alt+1''. You can see five previous code in current code indicator. You can cancel incorrect codes with the Undo button.

Analyzing the results

There is no support for analysing the data from this version yet. We have found out that almost every project needs some specific work in doing the analysis and its quite difficult to come up with good general analysis code without significant input. However, I'll try to write some analysis code for simple cases in the future. The result format depends on the selected configuration. If there are no modifiers the result format has three columns:

Time. Seconds from beginning.
Code. The behavioral code.
Class. The class that the code belongs to.

If modifiers are used there are result format will be slightly different: The first column will contain the time and the following columns contains the behavioral codes followed by potential modifiers.