[BlindRUG] newbie question about seeing relationships between variables

[Mike Gorse]

Hi all,

First of all, thanks for the list and for the work to make R easier to 
use! It's good that some people write statistics software and work to make 
it more accessible, so that other people can maybe learn to do things like 
analyze realtime bus data, so that other people can get around the city 
more easily...

I'm very new to R and to statistics in general, so maybe there's an easy 
answer to this that I don't know about. I'm starting a Coursera course on 
statistics and data analysis, and the course had a lab that involved 
investigating some survey data. In a few places, it advised generating a 
plot in order to see the relationship between two variables, but I'm 
blind, meaning that I can't see, meaning that I can't see the nice plots 
that R generates for me. Eventually I figured out that I could more or 
less do what I needed to do by subseting the data set based on the 
explanatory variable, taking summaries of the response variable for the 
different subsets, and comparing the results, but I'm curious whether this 
is the best way to do it / what other people would do in order to get an 
idea of the relationship between two variables in a data set.

Also, when I run
library("BrailleR")
I get a message saying that hist and boxplot are masked from 
package:graphics, so it looks as though BrailleR has its own 
implementation/wrapper for boxplot, but, when I call boxplot(), it seems 
to behave the same as it would if BrailleR weren't loaded (ie, put a 
boxplot on the screen). Is there something else that it should be doing? I 
don't see any new files being generated in my working directory (I'm not 
sure if I should expect them or not).

Thanks,
-Mike