Just yesterday I watched Mike Bostock remake this example live at Edward Tufte's seminar in San Jose. In the talk, he emphasized the importance of incorporatin

Just yesterday I watched Mike Bostock remake this example live at Edward Tufte's seminar in San Jose. 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.