On the “P-Side” at least, people have recently been running web-based experiments, and getting excellent results. I’m starting this thread as a way of sharing resources, and also perhaps talking about issues that come up in this domain.
The two projects I’ve seen come to fruition are Wendell Kimper‘s experiment on variation in Finnish vowel harmony, and Claire Moore-Cantwell‘s wug-test experiment on Hebrew denominals. Wendell used LimeSurvey, which we have installed on the departmental server (ask me if you’d like to use it). LimeSurvey didn’t work for Claire (it couldn’t pass a variable from one part of the experiment to another), so she developed her own java-based software that fit her needs. Interim summary: we have LimeSurvey, and it is a simple solution for relatively straightforward experiments – if you have more detailed notes from first-hand experience, please add them below.
We have the good fortune of having Michael Becker in our midst this year, and he has recently been working on web-presentation software he and Jonathan Levine call Experigen. He has run several experiments using this software, and demo’d it for a group of us this summer, several of whom immediately decided to set up their own experiments with this elegant set of tools. It requires a little more expertise in html, etc. than LimeSurvey, but we should have or get that anyway, right? Again, those with more experience, please comment below.