I became interested in client-side visualization libraries with my work on federated wiki. I repeatedly dig deep into Mike Bostock's d3 and surface smarter every time.
I first learned of d3 from Jeff Heer's keynote at WikiSym 2011. Jeff says, I will outline some outstanding challenges for data analysis and visualization: scaling out to large heterogeneous data, opening up the analysis lifecycle to collaborative effort, and telling it straight through interactive visual storytelling. site 
I found more inspiration in Science Magazine's interactive figures prepared for their special issue on population. I devoted my eighth wiki screencast to the subject. 08 Science Interactive Scrubbing
See History for my specific fascination with force layout independent of its usual application laying out network graphs.
Authoring well considered commits seems to be a good way to pair-program with the future. Jason Clark has applied the same technique to understanding ruby's rack middleware. github
See also Bostock on making reusable charts. This became our model for refactoring when our program grew large enough to deserve it. post