Visions and Re-Visions of Charles Joseph Minard

Abstract

Charles Joseph Minard is most widely known for a single work—his poignant flow-map depiction of the fate of Napoleon’s Grand Army in the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. In fact, Minard was a true pioneer in thematic cartography and in statistical graphics; he developed many novel graphic forms to depict data, always with the goal to let the data “speak to the eyes.” This article reviews Minard’s contributions to statistical graphics, the time course of his work, and some background behind the famous March on Moscow graphic. This article also looks at some modern revisions of this graph from an information visualization perspective and examines some lessons this graphic provides as a test case for the power and expressiveness of computer systems or languages for graphic information display and visualization.