Michael Friendly
2003-Aug-27 19:05 UTC
[R] Minard's Challenge: Re-Visioning Minard Contest
In a recent talk ('Visions of the Past, Present & Future of Statistical Graphics'), I talked about, among other things, the lessons Minard's March on Moscow graphic had for modern statistical graphics, and illustrated aspects of power and simplicity in several programming languages where this graphic had been recreated. I referred to 'elegance factors' of various programming languages in terms of the power, simplicity and transparency of data representations and procedural or declarative specifications required to program a re-creation (or extension) of this famous graph. It occurred to me that it might be of interest, perhaps fun, and hopefully illuminating to pose this as a formal challenge to the R community and others. Several exisiting exemplars are shown on my 'Re-visions of Minard' web page http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/re-minard.html (in the Gallery of Data Visualization, ../) These include programming examples in Mathematica, SAS/IML Workshop, Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics, images created in other data visualization systems, raw materials (images, data), etc. There are no formal rules for this "Re-Visioning Minard Contest", but each entry should ideally include: (a) an image file in web-friendly format (.jpg, .gif, .png, etc), (b) the program and data used to draw the image, (c) a 'what they were thinking' description of the process used in constructing the graph. To save bandwidth on r-help, I'll ask responders to reply to the list only with reactions to this challenge and what they deem useful to share with all readers. Other ways to reply include posting a web URL where readers can view the details or a direct email reply to me. -- Michael Friendly Email: friendly at yorku.ca Professor, Psychology Dept. York University Voice: 416 736-5115 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814 4700 Keele Street http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/friendly.html Toronto, ONT M3J 1P3 CANADA