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The best statistical graphic ever drawn?

15 August 2009

On a recent visit to our Seattle office, I wondered down Canal Street to grab a coffee. On the wall was a framed poster showing data collected during Napoleon’s unsuccessful march on Moscow in 1812 and his retreat the following year. The map was drawn by a French engineer Charles Joseph Minard in 1861.

I spent half an hour (OK it was a quiet day) looking at how Minard had been able to show so much relevant data and make a direct and accessible link with the events of Napoleon’s ill-fated campaign. It shows:

Geography: rivers, cities and battles are named and placed according to how they happened
The army’s course: the path follows the way in and out that Napoleon followed.
The army’s direction: indicated by the colour of the path, gold advancing into Russia, black retreating from it
The number of soldiers in the army: the band becomes successively narrower as French soldiers died - each millimetre represents 10.000 men (bear in mind the original map was about A1 size)
Temperature: the freezing cold of the Russian winter on the return trip is indicated at the bottom

Since that trip to Seattle, Minard’s graphic acts a powerful reminder that there’s always a better of doing things; especially when I’m thinking about using 20 pages of slides to show data – a kind of ‘slideument’. Let’s face it, they’re as boring to write as they are to present. There always has to be a better and richer way of showing something than through piles of histograms and pie charts.

Monsieur Minard – I salute you.

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