Dörte de Kok

Groningen University
Fellowship project title: Discuit – a tool for partitioning linguistic materials into equal sets
The goal: The current project will improve an existing python script and transform it into a tool with a graphical user interface that will run either locally or as a web application. The tool, called Discuit, will take a spreadsheet as input and generate the required number of sets, matched on the specified variables. These variables can be categorical (e.g. ‘word class’) and/or continuous (e.g. ‘word frequency’). Finally, one variable can be marked as “primary”. The items will be split perfectly even with regard to this variable (e.g. ‘accuracy in pre-treatment assessment’). The tool will be evaluated with existing datasets and made available to the community. Awareness will be created by a scientific paper, conference contributions and a small workshop.
The why: In psycho-and neurolinguistic research, item sets need to be partitioned into a specified number of subsets that are as comparable as possible regarding several variables in order to compare experimental conditions.