So this week will be a double feature, including updates for two weeks. The amount of participants I have tested has steadily grown and I get so excited seeing all the data I have to analyze. Although I am still nowhere near reaching my goal (I’m hoping to test at least 30 participants, preferably more), it’s exciting to see things happening and going smoothly. Sadly, I collected some data that I couldn’t use later due to audio issues, but that just means I need to work harder to collect more data. As an extroverted introvert, it’s sometimes hard to constantly remind the participants about posture and lighting so that I collect usable data, but I just need to think about the purpose of my PIRE experience and I get a renewed strength to give yet another reminder. Most participants are super nice and I even had a couple who asked to see my research paper once I’m done writing it. Although my dreams are vast and probably unrealistic at the moment (publishing an actual research paper before graduation), but I use that as my motivation to keep going and trying to accomplish everything to the best of my ability.

But that’s enough about my dreams, let’s talk analyzing data. I’ve started cutting the audio into their own separate tasks and also trimming down the video so that I can convert it into an MP3 file before pulling it into Praat. Within Praat, I’ve been just adding lots of boundaries in four different tiers to make coding the eye movements a lot easier to manage later. I did indeed run into an issue with Praat when I tried to use a base textgrid I created early to apply for a different participant’s audio due to differing lengths, but my lab manager and I are working through the issue and hopefully we’ll have a solution soon!

Besides that, fun story of the week(s): a tropical storm passed through Puerto Rico and caused many of my participants to cancel and have to re-schedule due to power outages and bad connection. Then the week after that, the same storm was passing through where I live and my power actually went out in the middle of testing a participant. Thankfully it came back and I was able to reconnect after about 15-20 minutes and my participant had stayed and waited. It was a wild experience but I know it could have been a lot worse!