2. The Collect Ratings Window
The Collect Ratings window allows users to open and control media files while recording ratings on a configurable rating scale. This scale has the option of displaying alphanumeric labels above and below it to anchor users to the poles of the scale. Ratings can be adjusted using one of two input schemes: mouse and keyboard or computer joystick. The appearance of the Collect Ratings window will change slightly depending on which input scheme is selected. When the Collect Ratings window opens, CARMA will attempt to connect to a computer (i.e., USB) joystick. If one is found, the user will be prompted to select an input scheme; if one is not found, CARMA will default to using the mouse and keyboard input scheme (without asking about using a joystick).
To collect ratings, users must use the Open Multimedia File menu option and then left-click the Begin Rating button. This will trigger a three second countdown. This countdown provides users the opportunity to prepare for the annotation task; no samples are saved during this period. Once the countdown is up, the media file will begin playing and ratings will begin to be saved.
During rating collection, users can pause CARMA by left-clicking the Pause Rating button or by pressing the spacebar on their computer keyboard. This will immediately halt the collection of ratings and pause the media file. Users can then left-click the Resume Rating button to resume their ratings after another three-second countdown.
After the multimedia file has fully played and all the ratings have been collected, users will be prompted to save their ratings to an annotation file. Annotations are exported as Comma-Separated Values (.CSV) files. CSV files are fast to create and open, simple to read, and small in size. Annotation files contain nine header rows that provide information about the file itself as well as how CARMA was configured when it was collected. These files can be opened in Microsoft Excel or statistical analysis packages, such as R and SPSS, as well as any free text editor, such as Notepad++.
The Collect Ratings window also has several options that can be configured for easy customization of the rating scale and measurement collection process. To customize the rating scale, users can set the axis' upper and lower labels, maximum and minimum numerical values, number of axis steps (i.e., numerical guides to the left of the axis), and colormap. The colormap is a colored gradient that provides a visual representation to the user. To customize the measurement collection process, users can set the sampling rate (i.e., how frequently the rating scale is sampled) and the bin size (i.e., the duration of the temporal bins that samples are aggregated into). Finally, a default folder can be specified for where CARMA should initially look to open and save files.
The Collect Ratings window with the mouse and keyboard input scheme
The Collect Ratings window with the computer joystick input scheme