R-Taskhelps

The R-taskhelps project is intended to add illustratory documentation for users of the R program for statistical analysis. R is arguably one of the best statistical packages in existance, and it is published under the GPL; it's free, it's pretty robust, and it works well.

R has an incredible amount of documentation available for it. However, the complexity of R is such that much of that documentation is terse, more out of necessity and practicality than anything else. We feel that the production of general introductions to various R functionalities in the form of tutorial documents would be a useful addition to the R documentation, and thus we are working towards developing such documents.

Currently, we have an initial example of a tutorial-like document for R, dealing with many common R tasks. The document can be found here and we invite comments for this and future documents.

Future explanatory documentation efforts could focus on:

• Data frame manipulation, merging and splitting datasets, restricting analysis to subsets, etc.
• Graphing. A general primer would be useful, because many of these basic graphing questions come up repeately on R-help.
• Specialized graphing techniques, beyond the introduction intended in the previous point. This could also include making production quality graphs for publication, multiple-section graphs, and how to configure these different regions.
• Visualization techniques using Xgobi. This could easily be a document in itself; Some documentation exists for Xgobi, but it tends to be limited to a basic description of the interface as well as some of the functions. Combining R and Xgobi gives an analytical tool without peer, and being able to use both effectively is a worthy aim.

Hosting

One of the mandates of SEUL/sci is to actively seek out and link to existing GPL-based scientific development projects focusing on applications in Linux, and when necessary, offer SEUL facilities (web, mail, archives, CVS/code repository, etc) to foster effective development and communication for those projects.

SEUL is a volunteer project whose goal is to help make Linux more accessible to the end user, so that Linux can be a more viable alternative as a desktop operating system. To this end, it hosts end-user oriented software development projects, and other projects of relevance (documentation, specialized Linux distributions, the Linux Knowledge Base, etc).