it's remarkable how much of this project has been about creating the right plots. makes me think about Latour -- the research is a manufacturing process for the plots (or at least for the software that generates the plots)
(note that these are different plots at each stage, so a plot that dominated our headspace in November or December might be totally forgotten now that it's a reasonably stable building block, i've even deleted some of those plots from the code to declutter it)
also how the creation of new kinds of plots or juxtapositions of data can feel like a research advance in its own right, because of how it opens up new questions and can get you unstuck (but it also can burn a lot of eng time, on the other hand)
even plotting data we _already have on the laptop_ on the table, in physical context and to scale with the objects it's about, feels like it gives me a much better understanding a lot of the time, especially when it's real-time plots so i can get an interactive sense of how it responds as i do things irl