Statistical Modeling by Gesture: A graphical, browser-based statistical interface for data repositories∗
James Honaker · 2014
We detail our construction of TwoRavens, a graphical user interface for quantitative analysis that allows users at all levels of statistical expertise to explore their data, describe their substantive understanding of the data, and appropri-ately construct and interpret statistical models. The inter-face is a browser-based, thin client, with the data remaining in an online repository, and the statistical modeling occur-ring on a remote server. In our implementation, we integrate with tens of thousands of datasets from the Dataverse repos-itory, and the large library of statistical models available in the Zelig package for the R statistical language. Our inter-face is entirely gesture-driven, and so easily used on tablets and phones. This, in combination with being browser-based, makes data exploration and quantitative reasoning easily portable to the classroom with minimal infrastructure or technology overhead.