Friday, April 01, 2022

Minard's Map of the Russian Campaign


Charles Minard's 'Flow Map of the Russian President's Shrinking Sanity' is one of the famous engineer's most overlooked and under-appreciated information graphics.This cartographic depiction of the Russian President;s dwindling sanity during the Russian army's failed attempts to subjugate Ukraine provides a stark visualization of the effect of a failing military campaign on the mental health of an already deranged Russian leader.  

Minard's famous illustration shows the Russian army's attempted advance west across Ukraine. A thick band illustrates the level of the Russian President's sanity at specific geographic points during this attempted advance.It displays five types of data in two dimensions: the distance traveled; latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and the level of the president's remaining sanity. 

This type of band graph for illustration of flows was to be later called a Sankey diagram.

The description accompanying the map is in Minard's native French.However (uniquely among Minard's information graphics) the work has been given a Russian title - 'Пу́тин хуйло́'. There is some debate as to the correct translation of Пу́тин хуйло́ into English. You can explore some of the etymological discussions around the transliteration of Пу́тин хуйло́ in this Wikipedia article.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Is funny, yes?