You are mixing two formats, just remove the dict
like this
dtDict = {str:'text', int:'short', float:'float'}
And this is how you should convert the types
foo = ['plot001', '01-01-2013', 'XX', '10', '12.5', '0.65', 'A']
from ast import literal_eval
dt = []
for item in foo:
try:
dt.append(type(literal_eval(item)))
except:
dt.append(str)
dtDict = {str:'text', int:'short', float:'float'}
print map(dtDict.get, dt)
Output
['text', 'text', 'text', 'short', 'float', 'float', 'text']