
Textual Strategies in Infographics: Observing Minard Observing Napoléon - masswerk
https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2018/observing-minard
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mikehollinger
I have a copy of Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" at work. It's a survey of
different methods of conveying information, with pros and cons. I occasionally
just page through it while contemplating some UI widget or another, and
actually wrote a rather nice CLI tool for displaying some sensor data
(histograms, auto-ranged, FTW!) based on some of his ideas.

The book not only goes back through various historical treatises like the rise
and fall of Napoleon, but also discusses newer ideas like "sparklines," and
even addresses why bullet points and font sizes contributed to the space
shuttle Columbia disaster.

It's definitely worth checking out Tufte's site [1], if you're into this sort
of thing. He's even got a series of small treatments on completely random
topics in the "Notebooks" section.

[1] [https://www.edwardtufte.com/](https://www.edwardtufte.com/)

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ghaff
There's another broader question with a design of this type.

Do you want a visualization that abstracts away everything except for some
essential aspect of data or do you want one that embeds a great deal of
information and ties it all together in a way that rewards considerable study?

This does the latter. It may or may not do so accurately (hence the article)
but it's certainly not a graphic that you glance at for 5 seconds and
immediately grok what it's trying to convey.

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masswerk
OP here. – Notably, I wouldn't criticize it for not being accurate (the
priority given to conveying instructive data has been underlined by Minard
himself and may be considered part of the methodology). The interesting side
to it is that it is opinionated (which is probably a property of at least some
types of infographics in general, since selection necessary introduces bias),
the even more interesting aspect is that the opinion (or narrative) conveyed
by the entire sheet is quite the opposite to what it seems to be for the chart
in isolation. And, I'd suggest, it has been particularly crafted for this.

You're probably right regarding the time that is meant to be spent on it. I
always imagined a contemporary beholder slowly following the path with her/his
finger, considering and commemorating the corresponding narrative. While it is
comprehensive, it's also slow.

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pvg
_I always imagined a contemporary beholder slowly following the path with her
/his finger, considering and commemorating the corresponding narrative._

You also mention something in the article about the events being in recent
enough memory to not require dates. I can't imagine a non-history-nerd person
looking at a similarly under-annotated map of, say, Rommel's North Africa
campaign and recalling much detail of specific dates or precisely what took
place at Tobruk or the Kasserine Pass or El Alamein. Would 19th century
viewers have been that much different?

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masswerk
It probably depends. I guess, Stalingrad is still in common memory, very much
for the same reasons.

Edit: This was really a major, paradigmatic event. E.g. pretty much over all
of the 19 th century it was clear and went without saying, if there’s a
soldier in a painting moving from right to left, it’s Napoleon’s army on
retreat from Moscow.

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pvg
Oh, no doubt. Hell, the nearest big street where I grew up was called 'Battle
of Borodino'.

