複数チャートの組み合わせ on Visualizing.JP

Minard's Map of Napoleon's March to Moscow

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0900

In 1869, the French engineer and visualization pioneer Charles Joseph Minard published Carte Figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armee Francaise dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813, a diagram of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign.

The work is widely regarded as one of the great achievements of information graphics. Edward R. Tufte famously praised it as a masterpiece of statistical design.

How to Read It

The diagram combines troop strength, movement route, temperature, time, and geography in one view.

Tan band: advance
The tan band shows the route of the French army as it advanced toward Moscow. The width of the band represents the number of soldiers, scaled by units of 10,000 men.
Black band: retreat
The black band shows the winter retreat. It becomes dramatically thinner as soldiers die from cold, hunger, battle, and exhaustion. The army began with roughly 422,000 men and returned with fewer than 10,000.
Temperature chart
The line graph below the map shows temperature during the retreat. The values are in the Reaumur scale, used in France at the time. One degree Reaumur equals 1.25 degrees Celsius.
Place names and rivers
Cities such as Smolensk and Moscow, along with rivers such as the Niemen, anchor the diagram in geographic space.

Historical Context

In 1812, Napoleon’s army invaded Russia with an enormous force. The campaign collapsed under the pressure of Russian scorched-earth tactics, long supply lines, extreme cold, hunger, and disease.

Minard’s diagram compresses the tragedy into a single visual argument: as distance and time pass, the army disappears.

Minard’s Contribution

Minard produced many cartes figuratives, or diagrammatic maps, drawing on his background as a civil engineer. This Russian campaign map is particularly influential because it integrates:

multivariate data
geography and time
quantitative precision
emotional force

Its logic continues to influence modern data visualization, from editorial graphics to interactive tools built with Tableau, D3.js, and mapping libraries.

Summary

Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russian campaign is not merely a map. It is a visual narrative of loss, combining space, time, number, temperature, and historical catastrophe into one coherent design.

References

Nobels, No Degrees: Visualizing Genius Beyond Credentials

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0900

Nobels, no degrees is a data visualization by Giorgia Lupi that examines the educational backgrounds and ages of Nobel Prize winners from 1901 to 2012.

The phrase “no degrees” points to the presence of Nobel laureates who did not hold formal academic degrees. The work asks readers to look beyond credentialism and consider the many paths through which knowledge and creativity emerge.

How to Read It

The poster is dense, but it is organized into clear information layers.

1. Age and Timeline

The central dot-and-line structure plots:

X axis: Nobel Prize year, from 1901 to 2012
Y axis: laureate age
Dot: one laureate
Double-ring dot: female laureate
Color: prize category, such as Chemistry, Economics, Physics, Literature, Medicine, or Peace

Average laureate ages are shown by category, making it possible to see the tendency for Nobel recognition to come later over time.

2. Education

The bar chart on the left compares highest degree by category:

PhD
Master’s
Bachelor’s
No degree

Scientific fields are dominated by PhDs, while Literature and Peace include more laureates outside formal academic pathways.

3. University Affiliation

The flow diagram in the upper right shows links between laureates and major universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Columbia, Cambridge, and Berkeley. The absence or thinness of flows for Literature and Peace suggests that those categories are less tied to elite university affiliation.

4. Birthplace

The lower chart groups laureates’ birthplaces into 30-year periods. It shows the geographic center of Nobel recognition shifting from European cities such as London, Paris, and Berlin toward American research centers such as Chicago, Boston, and Stanford.

5. Seven Notable Laureates

The lower-right notes highlight seven cases, including Marie Curie, Lawrence Bragg, Leonid Hurwicz, Guglielmo Marconi, and Elinor Ostrom. These examples reinforce the theme that achievement follows many different life paths.

Significance

The visualization questions the relationship between educational institutions and creativity. It does not deny the importance of formal education, but it places degree holders and non-degree holders in the same visual field, making the diversity of intellectual trajectories visible.

Summary

“Nobels, no degrees” treats the Nobel Prize not only as a record of achievement, but also as a human dataset of age, geography, gender, affiliation, and education. It is a data story about the nonlinear paths through which knowledge is produced.

References

Nobels, no degrees — Behance

Digital Nostalgia: Visualizing Internet History in Life Online

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0900

Graphic designer Paul Butt created the Digital Nostalgia series to look back at the rapid evolution of digital technology and the social effects left in its wake. The poster Life Online visualizes the development of the internet from its origins through the early 2000s.

Series Context

The series covers four themes:

the internet
audio and video formats
computer storage media
mobile communication

Each is presented as a timeline poster. The goal is not merely to list technologies, but to show how quickly digital tools become obsolete and how each wave leaves cultural traces.

Life Online

Top: Major Web Services

The upper section uses bar charts to show monthly unique visitors for services such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, YouTube, eBay, and Twitter. It lets viewers see when each service appeared and how quickly it gained users.

Center: Culture, Abuse, and Technology

The central timeline places events from the 1970s through the 2000s across categories:

Culture: online culture, films, memes, and iconic internet moments
Abuse: spam, viruses, attacks, and cybersecurity policy
Technology: ARPANET, the Web, Flash, MP3, broadband, and related infrastructure

This structure shows that innovation, culture, and risk developed together.

Background: Connected Computers

The gray background bars show the number of computers connected to the internet. From a small ARPANET network, the count grows toward the scale of billions, making the physical expansion of the internet visible behind the foreground events.

Why Nostalgia?

The title points to more than historical data. Early internet phenomena such as Dancing Baby, Napster, Flash, and the browser wars now carry a strong sense of cultural memory. Looking at the poster invites viewers to remember when and how they first experienced the internet.

Summary

The Digital Nostalgia series reconstructs digital history through memory as well as data. In Life Online, technical infrastructure, cultural events, abuses, and platform growth are layered into one view of the internet’s early social history.