Making interactive online visualizations with stata2leaflet and stata2d3

The last three years have seen explosive growth in the variety and sophistication of interactive online graphics. These are mostly implemented in the web language JavaScript, with the D3 (Data Driven Documents) library being the most popular and flexible at present. Leaflet is a mapping library also being widely used. R users have some packages that translate their data and specifications into interactive graphics and maps, which write a text file containing the HTML and JavaScript instructions that make up a web page containing the desired visualization. This translation into a web page is easily achieved in Stata, and I will present the -stata2leaflet- command which produces zoomable, clickable online maps. Contemporary interactive graphs benefit from allowing the viewer to filter and select data of interest, which is a second layer of specification implemented in the -stata2d3- commands. -stata2d3- capitalises on the consistency of Stata graph syntax by parsing and translating a standard Stata graph command into a web page. Users can choose to include explanatory comments against each line in the source code, invisible to viewers but helping them to learn HTML and JavaScript and make further refinements.