E1n1verse

I have a number of books I can only read and annotate easily using the Kindle software on either my iPad or my Mac. Their reading software does not have a built-in easy way to export the notes or highlights, so you need to do some mucking around to get them in a usable format.

First step is to install NoteScraper for Evernote. Once that’s done, I use the following steps:

1. Log into your Kindle account at http://kindle.amazon.com/ using Safari.
2. Click on the link to your books (https://kindle.amazon.com/your_reading).
3. Locate the book with notes you want to export in that list and click the title of it.
4. Scroll down to where notes start and choose “show your highlights only” (this also shows your notes).
5. Assuming NoteScraper for Evernote is correctly installed and the Apple global Script Menu is visible on the top menu bar, choose “Export Kindle notes to Evernote”.
6. You’ll be asked for some tags, a notebook to add it to (Kindle Notes), and whether you want each note to have its own note.
7. Done. It’s in Evernote now.

It can then be copied and pasted into DevonThink (the tool I use) or other electronic journal or writing tools you may use.

Don’t use a Mac? You can perform the first four steps and then manually copy the content from the web page to wherever you like, but formatting and appearance won’t likely be as nice.

I’ve quickly posted this based on my how-to in my own research journal in response to a Twitter question by Catulla. I’ll add some illustrative screenshots later.

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Credit: Screenshot by Heather Hopkins (Clevergrrl) under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

Image: I can just imagine this Blood Furnace boss exhorting people “L2P!” as he kills them over and over.

It is day two of the writing regime. Today’s plan is writing 750 words, writing CMA feedback, and working on the paper. I was musing last night about the approach to the paper, thinking that having an abstract or an introduction actually makes it easier to write because it provides a focus for the paper’s direction. I have heard other people say that it makes sense to leave the introduction to the last because then you know what you’ve written. I think the former approach might be more sensible for me. I can always go back and revise the introduction if it does not reflect what I end up doing. Focus, however, is priceless.

In addition to an introduction or an abstract, a title might also help. I was experimenting with variants of “L2P! Learn To Play Or…”. I thought that was clever, as it’s something you often see more experienced, impatient players saying to players who they think are not living up to their expectations in terms of expertise or speed. In the context of my work, however, it probably makes more sense to say “P2L! Play To Learn”, but I’m not sure how many people will get that. Nevertheless, a title is a starting point. I had both before I started my keynote writing and that turned out well. Perhaps I can incorporate the factoid into the abstract.

Abstract:

“L2P! L2P!” This is the exhortation you might encounter in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) when other players around you believe your skill or speed in playing is inadequate. It means “learn to play”. In this paper, we demonstrate how L2P has been turned on its axis to yoke the trials of play to the game of learning. 39 World of Warcraft players primarily playing in Europe submitted essays answering the question “Why do you play World of Warcraft?” in a 2010 study.

Using a grounded theory approach and discourse analysis, the essays were analyzed to ascertain the contributors’ motivations for playing and their reasons for persisting in playing. Yee’s player motivational framework subcomponents (Yee 2005; Yee 2006) were applied to each essay and contrasted with Bartle’s original player typology (Bartle 1996; Bartle 2003) in aggregate to determine overall, general motives these players had. While participants were not asked to write explicitly about learning and many did not provide any examples, several contributions are examined here as case studies of mundane and unusual examples, illustrating what these adults are playing to learn–a learning that goes beyond dungeons, dragons, and dwarves.

That does not seem too bad as a first go. I need to check on the discourse analysis; it might not be completely true. I also have no idea how I am going to write up the grounded theory bit appropriately, but at least that is accurate. I definitely followed that kind of approach in tagging the essays. I need to find some time to pore through the James Paul Gee’s book on discourse analysis. I just saw someone else in #phdchat mention it again yesterday. It keeps cropping up and I keep not reading it, even after I went to buy it and then realized I already had. That is trying to tell me something, if I would only listen. I also need to check on what to call Yee’s framework.

References:

Bartle, R. (1996) ‘Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs’, Journal of MUD Research, 1 (1). Also available from: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (Accessed April 22, 2011).

Bartle, R. (2003) Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Publishing.

Yee, N. (2005) A Model of Player Motivations, [online] Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=1 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Yee, N. (2006) ‘Motivations for Play in Online Games’, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9 (6), pp:772-775. Also available from: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

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Credit: Photograph by Keven Law under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

Image: Photograph of street near Elephant and Castle on a rainy day in London through rain-streaked window

I’m about halfway through my initial coding of the motivation essays collected last April.  I should have been done this months ago, but I’ve somehow been scared to do it.  I think the big reason behind that is I’m afraid that I’m doing it or will do it incorrectly.  As I am going through and creating codes, I cannot help but feel that I am not always focussing on the motivation issue, which is the primary question. I am generally coding for content or themes I see appearing in the essays.  As an example, an essay may express that the author is more likely to assist someone else if they feel that other person has put some effort and thought into their character.  That is not their motivation for playing, but I have still created a code for it as “assist others”.  When I get to the end and review the list, I will not be able to tell which ones refer to motivation.  Some probably are where a participant has expressed it as a motivation, but other instances, even of the same code, might just be a theme that was raised.

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I’ve been thinking about the design of the study I want to do on motivation in World of Warcraft. My immediate approach, similar to introductory programming students, was to jump right into the meat of it and start writing survey questions instead of planning. In order to get the data you need in the study, you need to know what questions you want answered. You need to plan. Without knowing that, how can you write survey questions to elicit those answers? So what is it I want to know?

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I have to confess to feeling a bit stupid. I have been struggling with MATLAB for weeks now, trying to get it to read in my data files so I can automate my analyses. My data is in a tab-delimited file and looks something like:

Doc1	Doc2	Doc3	Doc4
Doc1	100	76	18	91
Doc2	76	100	22	35
Doc3	18	22	100	65
Doc4	91	34	65	100

This is not too dissimilar from the labelled diagram, part of the MATLAB documentation on data importing. Except that, if you look at the table below it, which describes which functions to use, they don’t have a function with a similar example to their labelled diagram. Early on I thought I should be able to use dlmread, which allows you specify rows/columns for starting points or a range. My idea was just to have a range which excluded the non-numeric troublesome labels. No matter what I did, though, I could not get it to work. It was frustrating, because I could paste the data into the Import Wizard and that could handle the data fine. I wrote people, I researched on the web, and I tried all sorts of things.

Eventually, I came full-circle back to dlmread and experimented by making a small data file with unrelated data in it. That worked fine. So I then copied half of one of my data tables into the test file and tried that. That also worked fine. I copied the whole data table into the test file and used dlmread on it. It worked fine! What was the difference between the two identical data files other than their filenames? When I uncovered the answer to that, I kicked myself. My data files were generated years ago and stored on my Mac OS 9-based laptop. My laptop and the data have since migrated to Apple’s swoopy BSD-based UNIX goodness and that’s the environment that MATLAB runs under. So… Have you guessed the problem? Yes, it was linefeeds! The data files had original Mac linefeeds and MATLAB wanted UNIX linefeeds. D’oh! It just goes to reaffirm that the things you don’t see can really hurt you.

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I was talking about my recent posters the other day with Teetee/Pi. He was asking me questions about how to interpret Figure 3 which shows the clustered output that results after feeding similarity data into the multidimensional scaling algorithm. I didn’t have a copy of the page handy, so I pulled up the PDF version and happened to notice that the one-page version of my poster, destined for an ordinary sheet of paper, no longer had my name or my e-mail contact address on it. The only thing on it was a pointer to the three-page version of the poster on this web site.
Oops! Oops! Oops!
I was short on time when it was decided that a handout-sized version of information was needed, so I’d had my Sweetie build me the single page and the three-page versions based on the finished poster design. He got a little overzealous about saving space and, well, managed to axe the contact and affiliation information. It was missing off of the three-page version, too.
Alas, I didn’t discover this until after the Open Day, so the damage has probably already been done. Nevertheless, I’ve prepared new versions of both documents with this information intact and added page numbers, where appropriate, to boot.
Live and learn! Don’t be so concerned with the content that you fail to see the forest through the individual trees!
Downloadable Resources:
- A4 (regular page) handout sheet
- 3-page PDF version

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Today was my first day back at the University since leaving for a three-week trip to Canada at the beginning of last October. I’ve been a student at the University of Sussex since, I think, the fall of 1996. Yes, I’ve been a Ph.D. student now for 8 years. While, that doesn’t beat the record of Dr. Robert Runte, a celebrated perpetual student in my personal circle of friends, it’s certainly getting up there.
The last time I went away for an extended period of time, I came back to discover my desk was now occupied by someone else. Space is always at a premium here, even though the IDEAs Lab is fortunate to have their very own space fairy. This time, however, I only needed to shove aside a few piles of electronics gizmos. My “new” office is shared with the lab equipment manager, who made good use of my empty desk space.

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