Log data from the Multi-Touch Table at the HAUM

The Multi Touch Table at the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum (HAUM) in Braunschweig gives visitors of the Museum the opportunity to interact with about 70 artworks and 3 virtual cards containing information about the museum and its layout. The table was installed at the museum in October 2016 and since November 2016 log files from interactions of visitors of the museum have been collected. These log files are in an unstructured format and cannot be easily analyzed. The purpose of the following document is to describe how the data haven been transformed and which decisions have been made along the way.

The implementation of the steps described here can be found at: https://gitea.iwm-tuebingen.de/R/mtt.

Data structure

The log files contain lines that indicate the beginning and end of possible activities that can be performed when interacting with the artworks on the table. The layout of the table looks like pictures have been tossed on a large table. Every artwork is visible at the start configuration. People can move the pictures on the table, they can be scaled and rotated. Additionally, the virtual picture cards can be flipped in order to find more information of the artwork on the “back” of the card. One has to press a little i for more information in one of the bottom corners of the card. On the back of the card two to six information cards can be found with a teaser text about a certain topic. These topic cards can be opened and a hypertext with detailed information opens. Within these hypertexts certain technical terms can be clicked for lay people to get more information. This also opens up a pop-up. The events encoded in the raw log files therefore have the following structure.

"Start Application"     --> Start Application
"Show Application"
"Transform start"       --> Move
"Transform stop"
"Show Info"             --> Flip Card
"Show Front"
"Artwork/OpenCard"      --> Open Topic
"Artwork/CloseCard"
"ShowPopup"             --> Open Popup
"HidePopup"

The right side shows what events can be extracted from these raw lines. The “Start Application” is not an event in the original sense since it only indicates if the table was started or maybe reset itself. This is not an interaction with the table and therefore not interesting in itself. All “Start Application” and “Show Application” are therefore excluded from the data when further processed and are only in the raw log files.

Parsing the raw log files

The first step is to parse the raw log files that are stored by the application as text files in a rather unstructured format to a format that can be read by common statistics software packages. The data are therefore transferred to a spread sheet format. The following section describes what problems were encountered while doing this.

Corrupt lines

When reading the files containing the raw logs into R, a warning appears that says

Warning messages:
  incomplete final line found on '2016/2016_11_18-11_31_0.log'
  incomplete final line found on '2016/2016_11_18-11_38_30.log'
  incomplete final line found on '2016/2016_11_18-11_40_36.log'
  ...

When you open these files, it looks like the last line contains some binary content. It is unclear why and how this happens. So when reading the data, these lines were removed. A warning will be given that indicates how many files have been affected.

Extracted variables from raw log files

The following variables (columns in the data frame) are extracted from the raw log file:

• fileId: Containing the zero-left-padded file name of the raw log file the data line has been extracted from

• folder: The folder names in which the raw log files haven been organized in. For the HAUM data set, the data are sorted by year (folders 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023).

• date: Extracted timestamp from the raw log file in the format yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.

• timeMs: Containing a timestamp in Milliseconds that restarts with every new raw log files.

• event: Start and stop event tags. See above for possible values.

• item: Identifier of the different items. This is a three-digit (left-padded) number. The numbers of the items correspond to the folder names in /ContentEyevisit/eyevisit_cards_light/ and were orginally taken from the museums catalogue.

• popup: Name of the pop-up opened. This is only interesting for “openPopup” events.

• topic: The number of the topic card that has been opened at the back of the item card. See below for a more detailed description what these numbers mean.

• x: Value of x-coordinate in pixel on the 4K-Display (3840 \times 2160).

• y: Value of y-coordinate in pixel.

• scale: Number in 128 bit that indicates how much the card has been scaled.

• rotation: Degree of rotation from start configuration.

Variables after “closing of events”

The raw log data consist of start and stop events for each event type. After preprocessing four event types are extracted: move, flipCard, openTopic, and openPopup. Except for the move events, which can occur at any time when interacting with an item card on the table, the events have a hierarchical order: An item card first needs to be flipped (flipCard), then the topic cards on the back of the card can be opened (openTopic), and finally pop-ups on these topic cards can be opened (openPopup). This implies that the event openPopup can only be present for a certain item, if the card has already been flipped (i.e., an event flipCard for the same item has already occured).

After preprocessing, the data frame is now in a wide format with columns for the start and the stop of each event and contains the following variables:

• fileId.start / fileId.stop: See above.

• date.start / date.stop: See above.

• folder: Containing the folder name (see above).

• case: A numerical variable indicating cases in the data. A “case” indicates an interaction interval and could be defined in different ways. Right now a new case begins, when no event occurred when no new path started for 20 seconds or longer.

• path: A path is defined as one interaction with one item A path can either start with a flipCard event or when an item has been touched for the first time within this case. A path ends with the item card being flipped close again or with the last movement of the card within this case. One case can contain several paths with the same item when the item is flipped open and flipped close again several times within a short time.

• glossar: An indicator variable with values 0/1 that tracks if a pop-up has been opened from the glossar folder. These pop-ups can be assigned to the wrong item since it is not possible to do this algorithmically. It is possible that two items are flipped open that could both link to the same pop-up from a glossar. The indicator variable is left as a variable, so that these pop-ups can be easily deleted from the data. Right now, glossar entries can be ignored completely by setting an argument and this is done by default. Using the pop-ups from the glossar will need a lot more love, before it behaves satisfactorily.

• event: Indicating the event. Can take tha values move, flipCard, openTopic, and openPopup.

• item: Identifier of the different artworks and information cards. This is a three-digit (left-padded) number. See above.

• timeMs.start / timeMs.stop: See above.

• duration: Calculated by timeMs.stop - timeMs.start in Milliseconds. Needs to be adjusted for events spanning more than one log file by a factor of 60,000 \times \text{number of logfiles}. See below for details.

• topic: See above.

• popup: See above.

• x.start / x.stop: See above.

• y.start / y.stop: See above.

• distance: Euclidean distande calculated from $(x.start, y.start)$ and (x.stop, y.stop).

• scale.start / scale.stop: See above.

• scaleSize: Relative scaling of item card, calculated by \frac{scale.stop}{scale.start}.

• rotation.start / rotation.stop: See above.

• rotationDegree: Difference of rotation from rotation.stop to rotation.start.

How unclosed events are handled

Events do not necessarily need to be completed. A person can, e.g., leave the table and not flip the item card close again. For flipCard, openTopic, and openPopup the data frame contains NA when the event does not complete. For move events it happens quite often that a start event follows a start event and a stop event follows a stop event. Technically a move event cannot not be finished and the number of events without a start or stop indicate that the time resolution was not sufficient to catch all these events accurately. Double start and stop move events have therefore been deleted from the data set.

Additional meta data

For the HAUM data, I added meta data on state holidays and school vacations.

This led to the following additional variables:

• holiday

• vacations

Problems and how I handled them

This lists some problems with the log data that required decisions. These decisions influence the outcome and maybe even the data quality. Hence, I tried to document how I handled these problems and explain the decisions I made.

Weird behavior of timeMs and neg. duration values

timeMs resets itself every time a new log file starts. This means that the durations of events spanning more than one log file must be adjusted. Instead of just calculating timeMs.stop - timeMs.start, timeMs.start must be subtracted from the maximum duration of the log file where the event started (600,000 ms) and the timeMs.stop must be added. If the event spans more than two log files, a multiple of 600,000 must be taken, e.g. for three log files it must be: 2 \times 600,000 - timeMs.start + timeMs.stop and so on.

The boxplot shows that we have a continuous range of values within one log file but that timeMs does not increase over log files. I kept timeMs.start and timeMs.stop and also fileId.start and fileId.stop in the data frame, so it is clear when events span more than one log file.

Left padding of file IDs

The file names of the raw log files are automatically generated and contain a timestamp. This timestamp is not well formed. First, it contains an incorrect month. The months go from 0 to 11 which means, that the file name 2016_11_15-12_12_57.log was collected on December 15, 2016 at 12:12 pm. Another problem is that the file names are not zero left padded, e.g., 2016_11_15-12_2_57.log. This file was collected on December 15, 2016 at 12:02 pm and therefore before the file above. But most sorting algorithms, will sort these files in the order shown below. In order to preprocess the data and close events that belong together, the data need to be sorted by events and artworks repeatedly. In order to get them back in the correct time order, it is necessary to order them based on three variables: fileId.start, date.start and timeMs.start. The file IDs therefore need to sort in the correct order (again see below for example). I zero left padded the log file names within the data frame using it as an identifier. These “file names” do not correspond exactly to the original raw log file names. This needs to be kept in mind when doing any kind of matching etc.

## what it looked like before left padding
# 1422  ../data/haum_logs_2016-2023/_2016b/2016_11_15-12_2_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:56  599671 Transform start     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.3000000   13.26874254
# 1423 ../data/haum_logs_2016-2023/_2016b/2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     621 Transform start     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.3000000   13.26523465
# 1424 ../data/haum_logs_2016-2023/_2016b/2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     677  Transform stop     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2997736   13.26239605
# 1425 ../data/haum_logs_2016-2023/_2016b/2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     774 Transform start     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2999345   13.26239605
# 1426 ../data/haum_logs_2016-2023/_2016b/2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     850  Transform stop     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2997107   13.26223362
# 1427  ../data/haum_logs_2016-2023/_2016b/2016_11_15-12_2_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57  599916  Transform stop     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2997771   13.26523465

## what it looks like now
# 1422 2016_11_15-12_02_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:56  599671 Transform start     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.3000000   13.26874254
# 1423 2016_11_15-12_02_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57  599916  Transform stop     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2997771   13.26523465
# 1424 2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     621 Transform start     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.3000000   13.26523465
# 1425 2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     677  Transform stop     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2997736   13.26239605
# 1426 2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     774 Transform start     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2999345   13.26239605
# 1427 2016_11_15-12_12_57.log 2016-12-15 12:12:57     850  Transform stop     076 076.xml   NA 2092.25 2008.00 0.2997107   13.26223362

Timestamps repeat

The timestamps in the date variable record year, month, day, hour, minute and seconds. Since one second is not a very short time interval for a move on a touch display, this is not fine grained enough to bring events into the correct order, meaning there are events from the same log file having the same timestamp and even events from different log files having the same timestamp. The log files get written about every 10 minutes (which can easily be seen when looking at the file names of the raw log files). So in order to get events in the correct order, it is necessary to first order by file ID, within file ID then sort by timestamp date and then within these more coarse grained timestamps sort be timeMs. But as explained above, timeMs can only be sorted within one file ID, since they do not increase consistently over log files, but have a new setoff for each raw log file.

x,y-coordinates outside of display range

The display of the Multi-Touch-Table is a 4K-display with 3840 x 2160 pixels. When you plot the start and stop coordinates, the display is clearly distinguishable. However, a lot of points are outside of the display range. This can happen, when the art objects are scaled and then moved to the very edge of the table. Then it will record pixels outside of the table. These are actually valid data points and I will leave them as is.

datlogs <- read.table("code/results/event_logfiles_2024-02-21_16-07-33.csv", sep = ";",
                      header = TRUE)

par(mfrow = c(1, 2))
plot(y.start ~ x.start, datlogs)
abline(v = c(0, 3840), h = c(0, 2160), col = "blue", lwd = 2)
plot(y.stop ~ x.stop, datlogs)
abline(v = c(0, 3840), h = c(0, 2160), col = "blue", lwd = 2)

aggregate(cbind(x.start, x.stop, y.start, y.stop) ~ 1, datlogs, mean)

##    x.start   x.stop  y.start   y.stop
## 1 1978.202 1975.876 1137.481 1133.494

Pop-ups from glossar cannot be assigned to a specific item

All the information, pictures and texts for the topics and pop-ups are stored in /data/haum/ContentEyevisit/eyevisit_cards_light/<item_number>. Among other things, each folder contains XML-files with the information about any technical terms that can be opened from the hypertexts on the topic cards. Often these information are item dependent and then the corresponding XML-file is in the folder for this item. Sometimes, however, more general terms can be opened. In order to avoid multiple files containing the same information, these were stored in a folder called glossar and get accessed from there. The raw log files only contain the path to this glossar entry and did not record from which item it was accessed. I tried to assign these glossar entries to the correct items. The (very heuristic) approach was this:

1. Create a lookup table with all XML-file names (possible pop-ups) from the glossar folder and what items possibly call them. This was stored as an RData object for easier handling but should maybe be stored in a more interoperable format.

2. I went through all possible pop-ups in this lookup table and stored the items that are associated with it.

3. I created a sub data frame without move events (since they can never be associated with a pop-up) and went through every line and looked up if an item and a topic card had been opened. If this was the case and a glossar entry came up before the item was closed again, I assigned this item to the glossar entry.

This is heuristic since it is possible that several topic cards from different items are opened simultaneously and the glossar pop-up could be opened from either one (it could even be more than two, of course). In these cases the item that was opened closest to the glossar pop-up has been assigned, but this can never be completely error free.

And this heuristic only assigns a little more than half of the glossar entries. Since my heuristic only looks for the last item that has been opened and if this item is a possible candidate it misses all glossar pop-ups where another item has been opened in between. This is still an open TODO to write a more elaborate algorithm.

All glossar pop-ups that do not get matched with an item are removed from the data set with a warning if the argument glossar = TRUE is set. Otherwise the glossar entries will be ignored completely.

Assign a case variable based on “time heuristic”

One thing needed in order to work with the data set and use it for machine learning algorithms like process mining, is a variable that tries to identify a case. A case variable will structure the data frame in a way that navigation behavior can actually be investigated. However, we do not know if several people are standing around the table interacting with it or just one very active person. The simplest way to define a case variable is to just use a time limit between events. This means that when the table has not been interacted with for, e.g., 20 seconds than it is assumed that a person moved on and a new person started interacting with the table. This is the easiest heuristic and implemented at the moment. Process mining shows that this simple approach works in a way that the correct process gets extracted by the algorithm.

In order to investigate user behavior on a more fine grained level, it will be necessary to come up with a more elaborate approach. A better, still simple approach, could be to use this kind of time limit and additionally look at the distance between items interacted with within one time window. When items are far apart it seems plausible that more than one person interacted with them. Very short time lapses between events on different items could also be an indicator that more than one person is interacting with the table.

Assign a path variable

The path variable is supposed to show one interaction trace with one artwork. Meaning it starts when an artwork is touched or flipped and stops when it is closed again. It is easy to assign a path from flipping a card over opening (maybe several) topics and pop-ups for this artwork card until closing this card again. But one would like to assign the same path to move events surrounding this interaction. Again, this is not possible in an algorithmic way but only heuristically.

Again, I used a time cutoff for this. First, if a move event occurs, it is checked, if the same item has been flipped less than 20 seconds beforehand. If yes, the same path indicator is assigned to this move. If not, temporarily a new “move indicator” is assigned. Then, a “backward pass” is applied, where it is checked if the same item is opened less than 20 seconds after the event occurs. If yes, that path indicator is assigned. For all the remaining moves, a new path number is assigned. This corresponds to items being moved without being flipped.

A move event does not record any change

Most of the events in the log files are move events. Additionally, many of these move events are recorded but they do not indicate any change, meaning the only difference is the timestamp. All other variables indicating moves like x.start and x.stop, rotation.start and rotation.stop etc. do not show any change. They represent about 2/3 of all move events. These events are probably short touches of the table without an actual interaction. They were therefore removed from the data set.

Card indices go from 0 to 7 (instead of 0 to 5 as expected)

In the beginning I thought that the number for topics was the index of where the card was presented on the back of the item. But this is not correct. It is the number of the topic. There are eight topics in total:

Indices for topics:
0   artist
1   thema
2   komposition
3   leben des kunstwerks
4   details
5   licht und farbe
6   extra info
7   technik

On the back of items, there can be between 2 to 6 topic cards. Several of these topic cards can be about the same topic, e.g., there can be two topic cards assigned to the topic thema. It is impossible to find out if the same topic card was opened several times or if different topic cards with the same topic were opened from the same item. See example below for item “001”.

##   item            file_name                topic
## 1  001 001_dargestellte.xml                thema
## 2  001       001_thema1.xml                thema
## 3  001        001_leben.xml leben des kunstwerks
## 4  001       001_leben3.xml leben des kunstwerks
## 5  001       001_thema2.xml                thema
## 6  001        001_thema.xml                thema

New artworks “504” and “505” starting October 2022

When I read in the complete data frame for the first time, all of the sudden there were 72 instead of 70 items. It seems like these two artworks appear on October 21, 2022.

summary(as.Date(datraw[datraw$item %in% c("504", "505"), "date"]))

##         Min.      1st Qu.       Median         Mean      3rd Qu.         Max. 
## "2022-10-21" "2023-01-11" "2023-03-08" "2023-03-09" "2023-05-21" "2023-07-05"

The artworks seem to be have updated in general after October 21, 2022. The following table shows which items were presented in which years.

xtabs(~ item + lubridate::year(date.start), datlogs)

##      lubridate::year(date.start)
## item   2016  2017  2018  2019  2020  2022  2023
##   1     277  4082  1912  1434   424   394  1315
##   3     485  6730  3126  2356   528   457  1124
##   19    714  8656  4028  2743   660   698  1595
##   20    595  8461  3996  2983   938   657  1355
##   24    497  6638  2912  2251   649   439  1028
##   27    567  5959  3112  2318   651   711  1324
##   28    601  9329  4394  3056   778   762  1570
##   29    425  6865  3830  2365   516   615  1174
##   31    289  4118  2051  1218   291   296   675
##   32    562  7016  3477  2253   726   766  1647
##   33    509  4936  2242  1449   555   358   666
##   36    434  4505  2276  1668   373   387   976
##   37    242  4478  2182  1554   339   423  1168
##   38    480  4617  2144  1397   371   381   784
##   39    395  3227  1313  1003   237   161   622
##   41    282  3329  1303  1022   225   209   701
##   42    203  3113  1307   903   242   191   421
##   43    115  2420  1089   806   176   219   486
##   45   1491 13561  5924  4474   966   585  1828
##   46    903  9181  5340  3812   961   944  1648
##   47    306  4949  2395  1510   750   297   675
##   48    723 10455  5384  4162  1328   948  2031
##   49    433  4326  2124  1414   434   431   809
##   51    564  7837  4577  2991   884   659  1370
##   52    447  5021  2104  1729   471   349   840
##   54    424  5068  2816  2008   529   370   918
##   55    358  4859  2069  1428   341   403  1303
##   57    860 14264  6625  5092  1410  1221  2714
##   60    555  6865  3539  2336   639   586  1415
##   62    547  6736  3803  2210   795   633  1322
##   63    251  3677  1827  1241   300   282   527
##   66    552  6004  2774  1977   505   373   932
##   69    394  3730  1827  1438   272   206   680
##   70    226  3766  1843   973   293   268   703
##   71    557  6160  2490  1846   570   323   839
##   72    426  6194  2857  2129   508   635  1553
##   73    432  6125  2880  1821   583   395   939
##   75    258  5885  2418  1562   369   257   645
##   76    861 12435  6253  4214  1753  1153  2268
##   77    816  8595  4197  2897   699   674  1452
##   78    410  5632  2498  1924   394   408   850
##   80   1650 25687 12429  7782  1975  1712  4433
##   83    644  8618  4720  3026   987  1027  2294
##   84    184  2121  1231   759   231   254   465
##   87    149  1618   722   632    99     0     0
##   88    513  6996  3493  2272   539   533  1420
##   89    214  2204   950   723   156     0     0
##   90    281  3756  1372  1143   403   320   932
##   93    613  8528  4224  3015   696  1174  2058
##   98    462  6662  3265  2565   704   670  1453
##   99    180  4162  1653  1454   363   411   868
##   101   414  4209  1859  1282   392   411   981
##   103   677  8758  4366  3165  1045   909  1871
##   104   423  5256  2381  1865   463   467   933
##   107   181  2101  1106   788   205   146   339
##   109   321  4001  1619  1106   292   188   453
##   110   489  5846  2785  2008   494   387   923
##   125   640  8435  4519  3334   926     0     0
##   129   598 11322  5046  3369   910  1131  1682
##   145   419  7821  3945  2694   706   740  1396
##   176   507  8465  3968  2787   687   552  1544
##   180   516  7563  3720  2765   585   550  1272
##   183   377  4014  1819  1741   346   251   675
##   187   340  4222  2165  1753   319   312   734
##   197   426  7710  3603  2510   671   602  1217
##   229   303  4872  2360  1891   482   389  1005
##   231   271  3606  1851  1239   318   236   467
##   501  1915 15968  7849  5060  1157   890  2989
##   502  1212 14550  7111  4749  1105   883  2752
##   503  1308 15218  8632  6399  1626   870  2558
##   504     0     0     0     0     0   363   662
##   505     0     0     0     0     0   426  1533

It shows that the artworks haven been updated after the Corona pandemic. I think, the table was also moved to a different location at that point.