I'm also interested in "3. Visualization". Can you share how are you going to approach it? I'm interested in knowing what topics to cover, which books to consult, which tools to use.
I was planning to read Interactive Data Visualization for the Web http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449339739/index.html I think that's mostly an introduction to the tool (D3) but maybe has some info on visualization itself.
Also, this tutorial was an easy intro to D3: http://code.hazzens.com/d3tut/ Hopefully, the author continues to add to it.
A PHD in my office recommended The Grammar Of Graphics http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Comput... It seems much more technical and statistical but could be an interesting set of ideas to synthesize. I'm planning on borrowing his copy.
Mike Bostock's stuff also led me to this page on Hive Plots which is a pretty cool description of how to do network visualization better: http://www.hiveplot.com
This is all of course prior to actually having studied it. I'm hoping using these resources and playing with some toy projects will lead me down further paths. (Assuming I have time which I, of course, probably won't.)