A web-based coloring book survey application by the Research Software Lab of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Utrecht University
Project website: https://coloringbook.hum.uu.nl/
Research paper: Pinto, M., & Zuckerman, S. (2019). Coloring Book: A new method for testing language comprehension. Behavior research methods, 51(6), 2609-2628.
Contact information: coloringbook@uu.nl
IP and license: The intellectual property of the ColoringBook method belongs to Utrecht University. This software is intended for research purposes. For the license details see below.
The software allows researchers to test how subjects interpret language (words and sentences), in a playful manner without revealing the intent of the study. Moreover, it is a natural task for subjects that doesn't make them feel like they are being tested. It is designed to work well on tablet devices, in order to accomodate for very young subjects.
Test subjects are presented with a subscription form, instructions, a series of coloring pages and finally an evaluation form. After both forms have been completed and all pages have been colored, all data are submitted to the server at once.
Each coloring page is presented with a coloring instruction sentence (as a written text, sound or both), for example "the blue monkey is jumping". The instruction sentence can appear simultaneously with the coloring page, or before it. The subject is given the means to pick colors and fill areas of the drawing by point-and-click. This also works on touch devices. All data for the coloring pages are downloaded to the client side at once before the survey starts.
On the server side, all coloring data are collected in a table that can be filtered by survey, page, area and subject. Each individual fill action is recorded with the color and the exact elapsed time since the drawing appeared on screen. Researchers can also define expected results for each page and compare the data with their expectations. Tables can be exported to CSV for further processing in any spreadsheet or statistics software.
Researchers can compose their own surveys with custom images and sounds. The surveys are made available to test subjects through a fixed URL.
On the client side, test subjects just need to run a HTML5 capable browser. If you want to serve Coloring Book yourself, you need a system with Docker installed.
Coloring Book is deployed using Docker Compose. It has two deployment modes: prod (for production deployment) and dev (for local development). In prod mode, the application is run with a production-safe WSGI server and the containers log much less (debugging) information compared to prod mode.
For either mode to work, you need to add two configuration files.
Docker expects a file called .env to be present in the same folder as docker-compose.yml, containing at least the following settings. The ... should be substituted with the appropriate values.
CONFIG_FILE=...
DB_PORT=...
DB_USER=...
DB_PASSWORD=...
DB_DB=...
DB_ROOT_PASSWORD=...
The setting CONFIG_FILE should refer to the name of a configuration file (e.g. CONFIG_FILE=config.py). Create this file, put it in the coloringbook package folder and add at least the following settings.
SECRET_KEY = '12345678901234567890'
MAIL_SERVER = 'mail.server.com'
MAIL_PORT = 1234
MAIL_USE_TLS = True/False
MAIL_USE_SSL = True/False
MAIL_USERNAME = 'username'
MAIL_PASSWORD = 'password'
MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER = 'mysender@email.address'
With both configuration files present, run either docker compose --profile dev up --build (development mode) or docker compose --profile prod up --build (production mode) in the same location as docker-compose.yml. This will start the following containers.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
app |
The Coloring Book (Flask) web application proper, with a Gunicorn server in production mode. |
db |
A MySQL (5.7) DB. |
redis |
A Redis (6.2) message broker. |
worker |
A Celery instance for asynchronous tasks. |
Docker should automatically create the database (if it does not exist) and run the available migrations when the app container starts. To run migrations manually, run
python manage.py -A -c CONFIG db upgrade
where CONFIG is the path to your local configuration file, either relative to the coloringbook package or absolute. Replace the last part of the command by db -? to get a summary of possible database manipulations.
The project source files are automatically mounted to the local file system. In development mode (see below), any changes made to the application are applied immediately, and the server is reloaded ('live reload').
The application does not take care of authentication or authorization. You should configure this directly on the webserver by restricting access to /admin/, for example using LDAP.
By default, the application will run on localhost:3000, but this is customisable in the docker-compose file.
An overview of the database layout is given in Database.svg. For the complete specification, refer to coloringbook/models.py. Anything in admin subfolders is specific to the admin interface. Everything else in the coloringbook package is involved in delivering surveys to subjects and receiving data from them. Run python test.py for doctest-based testing. Motivations are documented throughout the code in comments; with some referencing to documentation for Flask, SQLAlchemy and jQuery, you should be able to find your way.
Once deployed, you may need to support users and restore missing data. How to do this is described in detail in the adjacent ServerAdmin.md.
This software is intended for research purposes. Licensed under the EUPL-1.2 or later. See the adjacent LICENSE file for licensing details.