Minard Day 2021: Resources, Research, and Inspirations
By: Michael Friendly
Tags: Data Visualization, History, Graphics, Minard

Michael Friendly

A collection of snipped images from Minard’s graphic work. Source: RJ Andrews

This article was originally written for an international group of friends and colleagues, Les Chevaliers des Albums de Statistique Graphique, formed over 20 years ago to organize the collective purchase of the albums of the same name, an exquisite sampler of the best data and map graphics of the late 1800s and perhaps of all time.

Over this time, various members of the group have organized conference sessions, written papers, and books on the history of data visualization, and enjoyed each other's company at Chevalier lunches and dinners. A subset of this group, Les Chevaliers des Pays Catalan, has met annually in recent years somewhere in the Catalan region of France and Spain.

For some years, it has been my annual practice to send Minard Day greetings to this group on March 27. Last year, this resulted in the article Raiders of the Lost Tombs: The Search for Some Heroes of the History of Data Visualization.

Happy Minard Day, 2021 Edition

Happy Minard Day to all! Today is Charles-Joseph Minard’s 240th birthday! He rests contentedly in Montparnasse Cemetery, Section 7 (48.83879° N, 2.325163° E). He doesn’t use email, but I do have permission to post this:

Moi, Charles-Joseph Minard, je vous souhaite de bonnes nouvelles et j’approuve ce message. Ai-je vraiment 240 ans? Le temps passe vite quand je pense à de nouvelles cartes. …

What follows is some Chevalier and Minard-related News for 2021.

New book: A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication

My Harvard University Press book (with Howard Wainer), A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication is going to ink shortly, due to appear in June, 2021. We plan to put color versions of figures on a website.

A final Afterword chapter, recounting Chevalier work to discover details of the lives and burial sites of some of our heroes (Playfair, Minard, Guerry, van Langren) fell to the cutting room floor of our editor.

I rescued this and published an article on Medium, Raiders of the Lost Tombs: The Search for Some Heroes of the History of Data Visualization. This is the first official collective authorship for Les Chevaliers des Albums de Statistique Graphique.

Unmemorialized heroes of data visualization (Author graphic)

Albums de Statistique Graphique

Some sample plates from the Albums de Statistique Graphique

Not really new, but thanks again to David Rumsey, all 480 sheets of the Albums de Statistique Graphique are available on his davidrumsey.com site.

Professionally cataloged, searchable, with images that can be zoomed to your heart’s content. This effectively completes my dream from 1995, when Antoine de Falguerolles first showed me the copy of the 1885 Album he had found, and I set about to discover the others in the series. The rest of the story is Chevalier History.

The Minard System

Some sample plates from The Minard System

Sandra Rendgen’s 2018 book, The Minard System, continues to get rave reviews. More importantly, Sandra has done Minardists a great service by providing a comprehensive catalog of Minard’s graphic works. From this, we finally have an authoritative numbering system, more or less in chronological order. The Napoleon’s Russia Campaign graphic is Minard #60. ‘Minardists’ can now just say Minard #48 instead of the more cumbersome Location of a New Main Post Office in Paris graphic. (I see I can now buy the Kindle Edition of The Minard System for only $3.11, but I’d have to buy a 24" Color Kindle to read comfortably.)

The Paris publisher Éditions B42 released a French translation of The Minard System last fall. It includes a preface by Joost Grotens, dutch designer and cartographer who has is known for several brilliant atlases himself. Sandra has also written an article (in French), https://visionscarto.net/charles-joseph-minard-cinquante-cartes

Color palettes of the Albums

RJ Andrews (@infowetrust) has made a lovely study of the color palettes used in the Albums de Statistique Graphique. He recreated 25 color palettes used in various albums and published these as SVG vector patterns on Github.

See also RJ’s earlier study, Seeking Minard. This contains a visual catalog of all of Minard’s graphic works, plus a Youtube video of the development of Minard’s flow maps of the cotton trade.

In 2020, RJ obtained a copy of Minard’s Des tableaux graphiques et des cartes figuratives. His translation and commentary, Illustration Invades Everything, gives a good sense of “what he (Minard) was thinking”.

Re-visioning Minard

To understand what is so special about historical graphics, it is often useful to try to re-create them today, a process I call “re-visioning”. Many years ago, I launched the Minard Challenge, and new versions continue to roll in. I can no longer keep track and haven’t been able to update that page on my server.

One of the latest, by Martin Grandjean is particularly nice: Minard’s map vectorized & revisited. It is available in vectorized (SVG) format, as well as high-resolution PNG, together with several related versions.

Minard’s Napoleon March graphic re-created by Martin Grandjean

Minard Vis in R (MinR’d)

David Schoch has taken the idea of recreating Minard’s works further, following Sandra Rendgen’s numbering system, and trying to recreate these in very high resolution using R. Thirteen of the 61 Minard graphs are available on his web page. These are not yet in an R package but are available on Github.

ENPC Collection

Some items from the ENPC Minard archive

Not to be forgotten: The École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées has long been maintained an archival collection containing their entire collection of digital works of Minard. They recently prepared an exhibit, Cartes et documents de Ch.-J. Minard, showcasing Minard’s work.

One of the best is the short book, Des tableaux graphiques et des cartes figuratives This was recently translated and illustrated by RJ Andrews, Illustration Invades Everything.

Paul Kahn — Touching Minard

Some Minard originals from the ENPC collection (Source: Paul Kahn)

Paul Kahn recently described a 2020 visit to the ENPC to view the original work of Minard and Léon Lallanne in the Archives of the ENPC, Touching Minard. The illustrations shown in that article give perhaps a small sense of the awe one feels in viewing the originals in the archive of the ENPC.

Minard in the movies

In the last year, Robert Kosara (@eagereyes) made a Youtube video, Minard’s Famous “Napoleon’s March” Chart — What It Shows, What It Doesn’t. Among other things, he presents some interesting historical details from the Russian side of the 1812 Moscow campaign.

For background music, I suggest The 1812 Overture with Canons. Tchaikovsky wrote the overture to celebrate the Russian victory at the battle of Borodino.

TODO: A Plaque for Minard

Charles-Joseph Minard is a hero of Paris and of France, in the history of the engineers of the ENPC, and among those who still find his graphic work inspiring. It is therefore very surprising that there is no monument to Minard, no “Place Minard” or “Parc Minard” in Paris, not even a plaque on a wall somewhere, saying “Minard Lived Here!”

Even Sigmund Freud has a plaque outside the Hotel du Bresil (near Jardin de Luxembourg), and you can book his room! Not far from Buttes Chaument and Pré-Saint-Gervais, you can walk along Rue Sigmund Freud.

Some years ago, Antoine de Falguerolles discovered a notice of publication of one of Minard’s works and in the Annales des Ponts et Chaussées 1845, p. 18, giving his address as 36 rue du Bac. We’re still waiting to be able to put a plaque on the door.

Cuveé Chavaliers

It has been nearly two years since some of us last met for a Chevalier lunch in Vic, hosted by Pere Millán. As a memento, here is the label from the 2018 vintage, Cuvée Chevaliers des Pays Catalan.

This is indeed a Grande Vin de Visualization. The label says “mis en bouteilles par C. J. Minard, ENPC, en retraite”. En retraite, yes; but well remembered!

This article was originally published at https://www.datavis.ca/gallery/minard/MinardDay2021.html