Using Keyboard Collect and Timeline

If you have a laptop to take into the field or your desktop system can be located near your experimental animals, this program can be used to record the behavior of one or mor animals in real time. The output can be turned into an MS-DOS text document with a DTA file type for input into TimeLine.

	Start the program and press the "Start Keyboard" button to begin data collection.
	Each printable key character can be used to code for a behavior. As an example, if you are watching two animals, "E" could represent eating by animal one while "e" represents eating by animal 2. When deciding on your codes, just remember that the codes are simple alpha numerics, so there's no difference between the number keys at the top of the keyboard and those on your keypad. When you're finished recording, press the "Copy to Clipboard" button. Open Excel, Word, or another program and paste the data into the application.
	The Data have been pasted into Excel. The X and Y columns are blank since no X-Y position data was collected (if you need that, digitize your video and use behavior collect instead ). Since we know that the original frame rate was 10 frames per second, a time column can be easily calculated, but is not necessary for this analysis. The behavior column is copied to Word (without the heading) and saved as an MSDOS TXT file with a DTA extension. If you do collect X-Y data, the formual for computing the distance between two X-Y coordinate pairs is: Distance = Sqr[(X1 - X2)2 + (Y1 - Y2)2] Distance = Distance / RealDistance
	Start the Timeline program and select the data file.
	The data are fully sequenced and analyzed. To see the graphic, press the draw button.
	A list of the behaviors, their sequence, the transitions and a transition matrix is generated. Each of these can be copied one at a time and pasted into Excel to produce graphs or do an analysis the timeline shows how the behaviors follow one another in the sequence.