[rkward-devel] [JSS-Announce] Special issue on GUI's for R

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Saturday 13 November 2010, Stefan Rödiger wrote:
> Thomas gave me a kind reminder to add the next version of the JSS paper to
> SVN. If you want add your content and make changes. Maybe you could give a
> brief feedback on the list what you plan and how long it likely will take.

I've started adding my comments. I'm roughly half-way through the paper so 
far, so with a bit of luck I can give you my revision by the end of the 
weekend. Much of what I'm doing is editing for style and moving a few 
sentences around. I'll address the larger issues by mail (and I'll make a 
start, below).

I see that I've also promised to look up a whole bunch of references. I'll do 
that separately, as it will probably take some time, and probably doesn't 
block any other work.

> Meik & Thomas: As far as I remember you worked on a plugin download
> feature. Is this something to include?

I'm added a short note that this is under development. Since this feature is 
not in an official release so far (and we'll need to do some more work on the 
details, too), there's not much we can write about this so far.
 
> Prasenjit: You worked on the plot history feature. I already added some
> notes to the manuscript. It would be great if you could write this
> section.

I've moved those bits from the "technical" section to the "usage" section. Of 
course adding some detail on the implementation will also be interesting. So 
actually there's two places to edit for this feature.

My "broad" comments so far:
- The paper looks quite comprehensive. Reading it, I see we have a lot to 
show, and I think we're on a good track, overall.

- The "technical" section has a lot of forward references to the "usage" 
section. I think it should be moved behind that. As far as I can see this will 
require almost no changes to the remainder of the text. I didn't do that, as 
it would have defeated the change-tracking, though.

- I know you put a good amount of thought and work into chapter 5 (about 
download numbers and LOC). But I'm afraid I feel it makes the article weaker, 
rather than stronger. You said the main purpose of this chapter is to 
demonstrate that RKWard is an established and actively developed project. But 
I think we show that quite well in the usage and technical sections, too. And 
I don't think the data we can realistically gather for this section is sound 
enough to add anything substantive to this. I don't think the reviewers will 
accept this, but even if they did, I think it would rather raise some 
eyebrows, instead of help the paper.

- Chapter 8 (the comparison) is beyond the scope of the article, too, I think. 
It's a good summary, and we should put it somewhere, for instance in the R 
wiki: http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=guis:projects . But the JSS will 
publish a whole series on R GUIs, with separate articles on the different GUIs. 
Chapter 8 looks more like a summary to that entire (yet to be published) 
series of articles, rather than to our article on RKWard. Of course it still 
makes sense to compare RKWard to the competition, as we already do at several 
places in the article. Just that summary table is not ours to make, I think.

- I'm not sure, what you were up to with chapter 9. If you're looking for a 
sample use case, I'd suggest to make up a very straight-forward case: 1. 
Import data from CSV. 2. Conduct a t-test on that. 3. Create a plot. 4. Edit 
the generated R plot code to achieve some fancy effect, such as a background 
image, or whatnot. I'm not entirely sure, whether such a use-szenario is 
needed at all, though.

- We could pick up the t-test as a sample plugin for the "Programmers' Niche". 
The "programmers' niche" could be moved to the appendix, and would need very 
little explanatory text besides the code. We already have a good deal on the 
plugin framework in the "technical" chapter, and we can't include a complete 
reference, anyway.

Regards
Thomas
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