Minard’s Visualization Review: French Invasion of Russia
Charles Minard (1781–1870) is famous for the information graphics he created in the field of civil engineering and statistics. Minard was famous for his geographic and flow graphs and considered “revolutionary”. Many of his works were published during his lifetime.
The visualization above depicts Napoleon’s led march to Russia, also known as the Russian Campaign or the War of 1812. This has been one of Minard’s best known cartographic. The graphic summarizes in a visual format what would otherwise be more than a thousand words to read! The graphic is relaying the following information.
- Direction: Troops advancing & retreating
- Temperatures experienced. Time in relation to the temperature (winter)
- Course: The path that the troop took, geographic location. Rivers and cities are named.
- Soldiers that started & remaining: Total Loss of life
- Details such as battle names, how the troop broke into sub-groups by adding branches.
Some have considered this to be the best statistical drawings ever. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the strengths and areas of improvements based on today’s visualization standards. I think that Minard’s visualization was definitely ahead of its times.
Strengths of the Visualization
- Storytelling via Infographic: The drawing attempts to storytell Napoleon’s campaign that started with 422K troops and the flow of that troop over time. Instead of reading paragraphs of text, he captures the details in a graphic form. This would have been impressive in the era, 1869, when it was published and depicted great narrative power, innovative and spectacular for its time. The drawing is not an all inclusive story about the campaign but encourages further exploration.
- Use of color: Beige shows the marching army and black shows a decreasing returning troops. Black adds to the contrast
- Audience vs Impact: I assume that the intent of the designer was to depict and amplify the sheer loss of human life during the war. That can be easily grasped in 2 seconds.
- Data correlation: The chart shows correlation of reducing troop size and decreasing temperatures as time progresses into winter months.
Critique
- Title: The map does not mention Napoleon at all, it could be better titled.
- Chart background: The paper color adds as a distractor. A white paper would be preferred in today’s era.
- Reading numbers: It is hard to tell in numbers exactly how many troops are advancing or retreating by just looking at the width of the lines. Showing the percentage of surviving would be an interesting summary metric. Visualizing 1 mm as 10K soldiers is hard and in some ways diminishes the impact of human loss. The final 10K surviving troops is more than 1mm and inaccurate proportion.
- Smaller chunks of information & comparative analysis: This data could have been split into various smaller graphs, however, Minard tried to pack a lot of details into one drawing, showing many dimensions of data.
- Understanding time duration: The drawing does not depict the campaign duration and how many survived each of the battles.
- Data point: Having a data point for those killed would have been impactful, possibly in red color. Indicating months for the temperature line would make the drawing more clear.
- Labels/Text Orientation: The labels are hard to read and in different orientations, needing one to rotate head.
- Audience: The drawing looks complex at first glance, indicating to the reader that there is some effort needed in understanding the content. If we were to think of this campaign in terms of key metrics that those nuggets of information are not easy to read.
- Impact: If the audience for this drawing is a student or researcher, then it does serve its initial purpose of eliminating tons of reading and gathering the initial details from the graph.
- Conclusions: From the drawing one can easily conclude that the reduced troop count can be attributed to harsh weather conditions, but it is unclear how many deaths were due to hunger, diseases, lack of resources and how many deaths can be attributed to each of the root causes.
