Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: Using jsonio, libd3, and libhtml to Create Reusable D3js

Exploratory data analysis/visualization is the bedrock upon which we construct our understanding of the world around us. It is an immensely powerful tool for developing our understanding of the data and to communicate our results in ways that are intuitive to many audiences. As our data increases in its complexity, static visualizations may not be the most efficient or sufficient method to extract the same meaning from the data. The jsonio, libd3, and libhtml packages were developed specifically to address this limitation within Stata and to provide a toolkit upon which other users could easily and quickly contribute. The jsonio package is a Java plugin that helps users to generate JSON objects from the data they have in Stata, and unlike .csv also retains crucial metadata that can help interpret the meaning of the data visualizations (e.g., value labels, variable labels, etc…). The libd3 Mata library mimics the D3js API as closely as possible to make it easier for users to take existing code and implement it in Mata without significant effort. The libhtml library provides HTML5 DOM element classes for constructing HTML documents. Together, these form a powerful toolkit for interactive exploratory data analysis and visualization.