This lab is an exercise in 'construal comprehension'. The techniques and tools illustrated in the lab are essential preparation for making your own construals. They are also the basis for the first assignment, for MSc students only, which is worth 10% of the coursework credit. As in Lab 1, the use of EDEN is scaffolded by the Empirical Modelling Presentation Environment (EMPE).

Getting Started

You are recommended to study the lab with a partner and to work on adjacent workstations. You and your partner will configure two different interfaces to the Lift model. By examining the Lift model from two perspectives, you will find it easier to examine the observables and dependencies in detail.

The resources for this lab are in the public directory /dcs/emp/empublic/teaching/cs405-2012/lab2.

To access the resources for Lab 2, you should open up a shell window (you can do this by pressing Alt+F2 and typing "konsole" into the search box) and copy the following into it:

In the course of this lab, you will first set up your own private work area for CS405 coursework and make a copy of the /dcs/emp/empublic/teaching/cs405/UsingEMPE directory within it. The presliftBeynon2003 subdirectory contains the resources you need to run the Lift construal in the EMPE. Explicit instructions for the setting up procedure can be found in the README.txt within the lab2 directory.

Once you and your partner have both set up the Lift model in the EMPE, you will be able to follow the further guidance is given in the EMPE model itself. Your initial task is to configure the dual workstation environment for the comprehension task. In this environment, one workstation will be devoted to the EMPE and the other to the underlying tkeden interface, a text editor window, and a special purpose 'symbol info' tool for recording observables. Images of the two views of the model to be set up can be found in the presliftBeynon2003 directory as View1.gif and View2.gif.

For background information, you may find it useful to refer to the webpage Using the EMPE mentioned under Further Study in Lab 1, and to the instructions for using the symbol info tool.