WebExp2 Experimenter's Manual - School of Informatics - University ...

8 Results and their interpretation
Once you have collected results from your experiments, you will want to access and transform/summarise these
results in some way. This section describes the format the results take and how to process them usefully.
You have three files for each successfully completed experiment, each in a separate directory:
log in a simple text format; this can be consulted to give insight into any problems that may appear in the
experimental results
subject an XML file describing the subject who completed the experiment
results an XML file describing the experimental sequence that was administered, and the results that were
collected
Note that each file has the same name, constructed from the id name of the experiment (the prefix), and an
iteration number (the suffix). The files have different extensions however; logs have the extension .log while
other results files are in XML format and therefore have the extension .xml. Thus it is easy to select matching
records for a particular experiment, from the logs, subjects and results directories.
8.1 Guide to the Subject file
This section describes the subject results file. Here is a sample subject file:
Figure 26: An experiment configuration record.
129.215.218.200
Linux 2.4.20-31.9 v1 dice 1smp i386
1.4.2 06
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5)
Gecko/20041215 Firefox/1.0
The browser string is taken from the ‘User Agent String’ which a browser provides when viewing your pages.
Note that browsers are not required to provide correct information in this string and some browsers (e.g. Safari)
actually identify themselves as something else. Unfortunately there is no way around this.
You will most likely come across Safari (on Apple computers), Mozilla, Firefox, MSIE, Opera, Konqueror or
Netscape.
Many browsers have evolved from older browsers, whose names still appear in the browser string for compatibility.
For example, Mozilla is the base for Firefox and Netscape, and Gecko is the original base for Mozilla.
For more information about browser identification strings, please view the useful resource http://
javascriptkit.com/jsref/navigator.shtml — the section ‘Additional browsers’ Navigator Information’
shows the kind of strings you will get for different browsers. The page at http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/
pgtsj0208b.html provides a good discussion of the problems in browser identification and how they arose.
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