[R] Minard's Challenge: Re-Visioning Minard Contest

[Michael Friendly]

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