Figure 1: The above chart is my attempt to reproduce Minard’s chart and tell the story of Napoleon’s catastrophic 1812 Russia campaign. I have used python’s Altair visualization library to plot the journey of Napoleon’s army in the campaign. I have used a two-layered chart to capture the complexity of the size of the army, location, direction, temperature and time in one plot. The first layer has 4 components. First, is a scaled/zoomed world map in the background to show the extent of land covered by Napoleon’s army, the trail of surviving soldiers with green colour showing the advance trail and brown colour showing the retreat. The number of surviving soldiers is also shown by the thickness of the trail. The city name, country name and soldier count are plotted as text.

The second layer has a line chart to show the decreasing temperature during the retreat. As next steps, I would have plotted the rivers using continuous points and animate the entire journey with a timestamp slider.