Development of AniWiki

The predecessor of AniWiki is Animated Statistics Using R, which was created in Oct 2007 by Yihui. As time goes on, he find there are two obvious disadvantages of this website: (1) the static HTML pages are not easy to maintain; (2) to build a whole gallery of animations by a single person is also difficult. Thus he changed his idea to create a wiki on May 26, 2008 so that everybody can participate in this project to contribute their brilliant ideas in creating animations in statistics.

Topics for animations will start from the basic theories of probability and mathematical statistics (CLT, estimation & hypothesis testing, etc), then go through classical linear models and nonparametric statistics, and finally be diversified into several directions such as time series, multivariate statistics, econometrics, numerical optimization, data mining and machine learning, etc.

As mentioned in the home page, most of the animations in this wiki are based on the output of the R package animation. The package is created on Dec 11th, 2007 and kept being updated since then. Till now there are more than 20 animation functions included in the package. Besides, the package can support both the output of HTML animation pages (based on JavaScript) and animations inside R graphics devices. For more information about animation, please refer to this page.

We are looking forward to more ideas on the software for statistical animations. If you have any ideas, please share with us in the Messages, Discussions & Ideas page, besides, you may either choose the Google Group Animation in Statistics or the R-Forge mailing list animation-commits.

Daily snapshots can be downloaded from R-Forge: http://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=208

To install the package directly within R type: install.packages("animation",repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org")

• Jun 04, 2008: Dokuwiki's math plugin was modified to generate TeX/LaTeX formulae in wiki pages; see the syntax and examples page.
• Jun 03, 2008: a plugin animation was created for AniWiki to insert animations into wiki pages conveniently.
• May 29, 2008: gained support for highlighting R code (also Rd code, etc) via GeSHi; many thanks to Philippe Grosjean who shared the PHP code with me.
• May 26, 2008: the wiki system DokuWiki was adopted as the supporting system of AniWiki.

AniWiki would not be what it is today without the invaluable help of these people (in alphabetic order):

• Hadley Wickham told me some materials from which I got some inspirations for animations. Besides, he also introduced the SWF Tools to me, and I have added a function saveSWF() to the package now.
• John Maindonald has provided a lot of suggestions to the development and improvement of the package animation. Some of his ideas are still to be implemented.
• Juergen Symanzik told me some previous resources about statistical animations (especially in the web), and most importantly, he reminded me of the importance of interactivity in the web. Hopefully I will implement his ideas in the future.
• Michael Lawrence gave me instructions on developing the GUI as well as the way to create animation frames for my R package.
• Philippe Grosjean offered the necessary files for highlighting R code in this wiki.
• Quin Wills gave me some suggestions on a better interface for the HTML animation pages.

If you have been overlooked, please feel free to update the list by yourself.