Comments on: Getting Minard to Spin in his Grave

By: Daniel Huffman

Daniel Huffman — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:54:15 +0000

I did not, but I’ll keep an eye out for it. Thanks for letting me know!

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By: dwight

dwight — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:51:27 +0000

ESRI got someone to update this using ArcGIS, and I thought the results looked pretty good. It’s in their latest mapbook, did you get a look at it?

By: Daniel Huffman

Daniel Huffman — Sun, 20 May 2012 03:54:48 +0000

Sadly, no one entered, though there were some folks interested at the time. I made a quiet mention of the failure in a later post.

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By: sgtnasty

sgtnasty — Sun, 20 May 2012 03:49:29 +0000

Were any results ever published for this?

By: Rdm

Rdm — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 07:26:52 +0000

For a map that took me quite a while to figure out, I have to side with Bill. It’s not easy to figure out if these odd angled lines represent locations or trends–it’s not obvious that they do both, but show neither very clearly.

Tufte et al. are maybe overimpressed with the data density….

By: Minard Reminder « Cartastrophe

Minard Reminder « Cartastrophe — Sun, 02 May 2010 01:21:27 +0000

[...] a reminder that the deadline for Cartastrophe’s Minard Redesign Competition is June 1st, which is one month from now. You, too, could win a grab bag of old maps! I’ve [...]

By: Lurker

Lurker — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:33:53 +0000

Darn! They already took my idea of converting that bizarre temperature scale to C/F…

By: David Medeiros

David Medeiros — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:17:50 +0000

Thats a really interesting thought, I’d love to see what could be dug up on that idea.

By: Daniel Huffman

Daniel Huffman — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:42:33 +0000

This may be a question for someone who is versed in cartographic history, but I wonder if a legend statement wasn’t an option in 1869? It could well be that modern readers have become more literate with legends and other interpretation guides. Perhaps Minard’s audience would have been unfamiliar with the idea, thus he needed to be more verbose than a modern designer would be.

Again, not sure about that one, but it seems a viable explanation.

By: David Medeiros

David Medeiros — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:35:33 +0000

I could not disagree more, but I think your sentiment is close to the truth, just slightly misplaced. I would argue that it is not the verbal explanation (or lack of) that marks a graph or statistical map as effective but its ability to communicate its data without the need to also tabularize that data.

Minards map is both specific in its measured depiction of troop loss as well as general and emotional in how well it tells the story of catastrophic loss without the reader needing to see the real numbers.

Additionally, just because Minard included a lengthy description doesn’t mean the map needed it. I think you could get away with a simple legend and perhaps a brief note on his alteration of history (ie the separation of troops at Minsk and Mikilow).

His paragraph is in reality nothing more than what most cartographers would include on any statistical map (a legend, scale, sources and notation on changes to the data), its juts in paragraph form rather than visual.