Reconstructing Minard's graphic with the relational visualisation notation

Abstract

Richly expressive information visualisations are difficult to design and rarely found. Few software tools can generate multi-dimensional visualisations at all, let alone incorporate artistic detail. The Relational Visualisation Toolkit is a new system for specifying highly expressive graphical representations of data without traditional programming. We seek to discover the accessible power of this notation-both its graphical expressiveness and its ease of use. Towards this end we have used the system to design and reconstruct Minard's Visualisation of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. The resulting image is very similar to the original, and the design is straightforward to construct. Furthermore, the design is sufficiently general to be able to visualise Hitler's WWII defeat before Moscow.