How about not doing this? Are you sure that using their data for your purposes is allowed by New York Times? Or are you convinced that the data is not copyrightable?
I quickly glanced at the source and the bottom of the page lists it as Copyright to the New York Times.
If you did this to my site then I would be extremely angry.
Update 2012-03-10
The questioner claims that this is legal for two reasons: that the information is data and not subject to copyright; and that they wish to use this for research purposes and thus copyright does not apply to them.
Copyrightability of data
US case law is a little different to many other countries in how far it goes in defining data as not being copyrightable. The leading case in the area is Feist v. Rural. The subject matter was Rural refusing to license its telephone listings to Feist so Feist used them anyway. Rural sued for copyright infringement and lost. Quoting from the case:
The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus
a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act
of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable.
Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality
because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what
order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may
use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those
components of the work that are original to the author, not to the
facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the
scope of protection in fact-based works.
Canadian law is not relevant to the current question but I'll raise it to compare and contrast. The leading case here is CCH Canadian Ltd vs Law Society of Upper Canada. Quoting Wikipedia's quoting of the judgment:
McLachlin rejects Justice O'Connor's "minimal degree of creativity"
test but agrees with her assessment of the "sweat of the brow"
approach and finds it too low a requirement. Instead, McLachlin takes
the middle ground by requiring "that an original work be the product
of an exercise of skill and judgment" where "skill" is "the use of
one's knowledge, developed aptitude or practised ability in producing
the work" and "judgment" is "the use of one's capacity for discernment
or ability to form an opinion or evaluation by comparing different
possible options in producing the work". (para 16) As well, "[t]he
exercise of skill and judgment required to produce the work must not
be so trivial that it could be characterized as a purely mechanical
exercise." (para 16) Importantly, it is required that the work "must
be more than a mere copy of another work." (para. 16) However,
"creativity is not required to make a work 'original'." (para. 25)
Use of copyrighted works for research purposes
In copyright law, fair use (US) or fair dealing (common law countries) recognizes that a work shouldn't exist all by itself but becomes part of the culture by being discussed, criticized, referenced, etc.
In US law, "research" is specifically allowed as a reason to for fair use but note that one of the four factors is "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole".
One consideration is whether the new work adds something different than the old. Quoting Wikipedia again, "To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. A key consideration is the extent to which the use is interpreted as transformative, as opposed to merely derivative."
Indeed, my preparation of this extended answer with lots of quotes comes under fair use (in my opinion). I'm welding a bunch of information together to create a new work.
Legality of site scraping
There was a recent case in the BC Supreme Court, Century 21 v Rogers, which discussed similar issues to what you propose. Quoting Michael Geist's comments,
Century 21's terms prohibited copying or scraping its content. By
doing so, Zoocasa breached the contract...copying the full length
property descriptions for several months constituted copyright
infringement copying truncated, shorter descriptions did not (an
example the court provides is "212-819 Hamilton St, Vancouver, B.C.
V6Z 6M2 $285,000 - 1 Bed, 1 Bath - Great Newly Updated Jr 1 Bedroom at
819 Hamilton. This is a great West facing 1 bedroom suite which has
lots of great. …") copying photographs of properties constituted
copyright infringement
Certainly, being a Canadian case (and only a provincial one so far) it's not very persuasive in a US court but I would suggest that a US court probably isn't going to judge things very differently.
Conclusion
Purely in my opinion, and I'm certainly not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, I'd suggest that scraping the data in order to produce a very similar version of the same map, especially for commercial purposes, would probably be copyright infringement.
Using the data for research purposes to create a new work, especially if you don't use all of the data, is probably safe under both the fair use and data doctrines.
