[Babase] mpis-further thoughts after using

Susan Alberts alberts at duke.edu
Sun Mar 23 08:00:31 EDT 2008


Dear all,

I have been using the mpis table quite a lot in the past few weeks.  
Overall it's really great to have the data in this queryable format.  
I know it took a lot of work, and I'm grateful.  Also, we've been  
cleaning it up bit by bit as I've been using it, in a series of  
emails between Lacey and me (which in retrospect maybe I should have  
sent to babase mailing list, but they were mostly small errors).

However, I've learned some things that will require changes to deal  
with. Some of these changes are things that will need to be done  
before we import the data into babase (at some unknown time in the  
future). And I think it will also entail changing (slightly) the  
eventual structure of the mpis files in babase.

Specifically, when we discussed the problem of interactions with  
multiple actors or recips (as in 'SPY, ICA vs ALE' or ALE vs SPY,  
ICA) we explicitly decided to enter them that way in the table. That  
is, we decided to violate the rule that every row is a dyadic  
interaction, to see how well it would work. This was because it was  
hard for us to see how to reconstruct dyadic interactions out of these.

However, it really does not work well at all. It becomes impossible,  
for instance, to get a count of all mpis that involved adult males  
(because babase can't recognize the string "SPY, ICA" as an adult  
male). I think we have to somehow figure out how to enter these in a  
way that allows them to be queryable and more importantly joinable on  
the actors and recipients names. I've had to pull out all the coalids  
with multiple actors or recips and manually (in excel) split those  
rows up into dyadic interactions, then reimport into my minibabase  
database.

One way to fix the problem is to do what I did, which is to force  
every interaction to be dyadic, that is to split up the ones like ALE  
vs SPY, ICA into ALE vs SPY and then a separate line for ALE vs ICA.  
We would have to then somehow have a column that indicates the  
relationship between the two rows, to indicate that they were a joint  
action (or that the action was received jointly).

let me know your thoughts.

Susan


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