Just yesterday I watched Mike Bostock remake this example live at Edward Tufte's seminar in San Jose.<p>In the talk, he emphasized the importance of incorporating Makefiles into the workflow more than the text of this tutorial does. It basically documents exactly where you got the data from and what basic transformations you applied to it. The NYT uses this to streamline their process of developing graphics--so if, say, a graphic from six months ago needs to be revisited again for a new story on the same topic, nobody has to fumble around trying to remember where the data came from, etc. I got the impression that this was the advice of someone who had been burned by not following it in the past.
Nice! I really like building stuff with D3. I just put this up the other day though I'm still toying around with it. It's a visualization of what precincts are ticketing drivers in NYC. D3 has made doing stuff like this pretty easy.<p><a href="http://uturn.wolvesintheserverroom.com/" rel="nofollow">http://uturn.wolvesintheserverroom.com/</a>
Perfect timing, just learning how to make a map in d3 for Bower stats [1]. Thought after experimenting with choropleth maps [2], bubbles on maps and dorling maps [3] [4], dorling maps appear to be the best way to show very dense info on relationships with vague references to geography.<p>[1] <a href="https://shan.io/bower/" rel="nofollow">https://shan.io/bower/</a>
[2] <a href="http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606" rel="nofollow">http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606</a>
[3] <a href="http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id0120.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_pu...</a>
[4] <a href="http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/dorling-world/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/dorling-world/</a>
I wonder what the best way is to group populations from neighboring counties.<p>The east coast has a much higher density of small counties, giving the NY area a look very different from that around LA.