Exporting

We export data from PsyNet experiments using the command line. Choose the appropriate command depending on whether you want to export data from a local experiment, an SSH server, or Heroku.

psynet export local
psynet export ssh --app my-app-name
psynet export heroku --app my-app-name

Note

Prepend docker/ to these commands if you are running PsyNet within Docker.

The data is saved by default to ~/PsyNet-data/export. The organization of exports and the naming of the files is still under discussion and development. However, there are already a couple of important principles that are worth sharing:

Anonymization. Data can be exported in anonymous or non-anonymous mode. Anonymous mode strips worker IDs from the participants table and excludes assets that are marked as personal, for example audio recordings. This is good for producing datasets that you want to upload to open-access repositories.

Database vs processed data. Data is by defaulted exported in both database form and processed form. The database form corresponds to the exact way in which the data is stored in the database when the experiment is live. This format is required if you want to resurrect an experiment from a snapshot. The processed form is more suited to downstream data analysis; it unpacks some of the data formats and merges certain information between tables.

Currently the data processing step can be slow for large databases. We are working on this problem and plan to improve it significantly.