Charles joseph menard biography samples full

Charles Joseph Minard — was a French civil engineer who is widely recognised as one of the early masters of data visualisation. In my opinion, Charles Minard is perhaps most innovative data visualisation scientist given the limited technology of his time, and was very prolific in producing several intricate graphs. His is particularly known for his ability to reduce multidimensional complexity of important questions to simple graphs that could be easily decoded even by the general public.

The war campaign was disastrous, starting with about , troops from the Polish border to Russia, reaching Moscow with only , and returning defeated with just 10, soldiers.

Charles Joseph Minard was a French

The graph shows the extent of devastation, and is a masterpiece of simplifying complexity as it encodes seven dimensions: size of army, direction advancing or retreating , the distance travelled, latitude and longitude, location related to significant battles, temperature, and date. Here is the original graph :. As a tribute to Charles Minard, I will try to reproduce this graph as closely as possible using Stata.

The data, although accurate in recording latitude and longitude, is not accurate in representing the figurative representation by Charles Minard so I make some manual adjustments to latitude and longitude. I also pair the longitude of temperature with the longitude of march locations. The most important aspect of data management is finding a way to encode the widths of the line segments so that they represent the size of the advancing and retreating army.

This is done by expressing the size of the army in relative terms, as portions to the maximum at any given point in time. The bottom part of the chart encodes another piece of information using another line implantation with fixed line width. This line encodes the temperature during the return march from Moscou Moscow to Kwono Kaunas. Additional line implantations are employed to connect temperature information with the location of the return path.

These vertical lines also act as connections between the temporal data of the date that the temperature was recorded with the spatial data of key locations. The point implantation is also used to encode locations of key battles and events.