On this R-data statistics page, you will find information about the Minard.troops data set which pertains to Data from Minard's famous graphic map of Napoleon's march on Moscow. The Minard.troops data set is found in the HistData R package. You can load the Minard.troops data set in R by issuing the following command at the console data("Minard.troops"). This will load the data into a variable called Minard.troops. If R says the Minard.troops data set is not found, you can try installing the package by issuing this command install.packages("HistData") and then attempt to reload the data. If you need to download R, you can go to the R project website. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) version of the Minard.troops R data set. The size of this file is about 1,142 bytes.

Data from Minard's famous graphic map of Napoleon's march on Moscow

Description

Charles Joseph Minard's graphic depiction of the fate of Napoleon's Grand Army in the Russian campaign of 1815 has been called the "greatest statistical graphic ever drawn" (Tufte, 1983). Friendly (2002) describes some background for this graphic, and presented it as Minard's Chalenge: to reproduce it using modern statistical or graphic software, in a way that showed the elegance of some computer language to both describe and produce this graphic.

Usage

data(Minard.troops)
data(Minard.cities)
data(Minard.temp)

Format

Minard.troops: A data frame with 51 observations on the following 5 variables giving the number of surviving troops.

long

Longitude

lat

Latitude

survivors

Number of surviving troops, a numeric vector

direction

a factor with levels A ("Advance") R ("Retreat")

group

a numeric vector

Minard.cities: A data frame with 20 observations on the following 3 variables giving the locations of various places along the path of Napoleon's army.

long

Longitude

lat

Latitude

city

City name: a factor with levels Bobr Chjat ... Witebsk Wixma

Minard.temp: A data frame with 9 observations on the following 4 variables, giving the temperature at various places along the march of retreat from Moscow.

long

Longitude

temp

Temperature

days

Number of days on the retreat march

date

a factor with levels Dec01 Dec06 Dec07 Nov09 Nov14 Nov28 Oct18 Oct24

Details

date in Minard.temp should be made a real date in 1815.

Source

http://www.cs.uic.edu/~wilkinson/TheGrammarOfGraphics/minard.txt

References

Friendly, M. (2002). Visions and Re-visions of Charles Joseph Minard, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 27, No. 1, 31-51.

Friendly, M. (2003). Re-Visions of Minard. http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/re-minard.html

Examples

data(Minard.troops); data(Minard.cities)## Not run: 
require(ggplot2)
 plot_troops <- ggplot(Minard.troops, aes(long, lat)) +
   geom_path(aes(size = survivors, colour = direction, group = group))
   
 plot_both <- plot_troops + 
   geom_text(aes(label = city), size = 4, data = Minard.cities)
   
 plot_polished <- plot_both + 
   scale_size(to = c(1, 12), 
     breaks = c(1, 2, 3) * 10^5, labels = comma(c(1, 2, 3) * 10^5)) + 
   scale_colour_manual(values = c("grey50","red")) +
   xlab(NULL) + 
   ylab(NULL)
 
# re-scale the plot window to an aspect ratio of ~ 4 x 1
 windows(width=12, height=3)
 plot_polished
 
 ## TODO: add the plot of temperature below## End(Not run)

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Dataset imported from https://www.r-project.org.