The Minard Map is considered one of the best graphical representation of all time. Many reasons contribute to its legacy but some of the most important ones are the vastly different colors, minimal lines and text, and it shows a route. In my opinion, the Minard Map is confusing but that is primarily due to the lines that appear at the bottom of the page. It seems like a lot to keep track of to me, but it is quite remarkable that it is able to portray the amount of information it is. I think that the annotations added by Michael Sandberg make it much clearer on what aspects of the map we should be looking at and help to serve as a key for the map.
Something that I realized in the course of this exercise was how bad pie charts are at describing a set of data. It is extremely hard to put any relevant meaning behind a small sliver of a circle if there are so many other slivers. It starts to get hard to tell the size apart when they start to get smaller and smaller. This is why I will try to avoid pie charts in my endeavors and instead try with bar charts.
In class we heard from Lin Winton and something that I took away from this is there is tons of easy ways to make all different types of graphs on your own by using Google Sheets or Excel. Additionally, I took special notice of the example she showed in which the trend line was made a different color than the points around it that helped to contribute to its shape. I thought that this was a good way to draw the attention to the results of the graph, the trend line, rather than the individual data points. Another big takeaway from Lin’s lecture was that the absolute numbers in your data aren’t always the most reliable, sometimes it is better to use relative numbers. This was exemplified in the lecture by the use of total unemployment numbers in California next to a graph of the same number per 100,000 people.
I agree with you that I found the Minard map confusing. While I appreciated its ability to combine multiple datasets in one image, I thought it wasn’t super accessible to the public audience or easy to understand.
Will, I took away a lot of the same key points as you from this exercise! In particular, I never realized how confusing pie charts can be to interperet when push comes to shove, I agree that I also will try to steer away from them in the future.
I also found the Minard map a bit confusing. But I found the general message pretty clear, and elegant. I thought that using script for the font also made the map less accessible.