HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED who the readers of the New York Times website are? We have. We also wonder what time of day they tend to visit the site, what devices they use to consume our content, and where they come from. New York, Paris, Boise? We think about all of these questions, from the who and the when to the how and the why.

In the New York Times Research and Development Labs, a simple lunchtime conversation on this very topic led to the development of the research visualization described in this chapter. As you'll see, we started with a very simple collection of location-based data and quickly became engrossed by the amount of data and the potential for visualizations. We eventually created a visualization showing a day's worth of traffic to nytimes.com and mobile.nytimes.com on a world and a U.S. map.