Minard Napoleon Russian campaign data
The data set used by Charles Joseph Minard to generate the famous graph. The example below shows how to recreate the main panel of the graph using riverplot from the provided data.
minard
Named list with two data frames:
data frame with geographic locations of the Napoleon army (longitude and latitude) and the direction of the march
connections between positions
First, node and edge data frames must get new column names (see
makeRiver function for details). Then, based on the
direction of the Napoleon army, style information (right and left edge
color style for each node) is entered in the
nodes variable. Then, a riverplot object is generated from the
nodes and edges data frames.
To use the same color coding as Minard, the direction variable is converted to color codes in the col column of the edges object.
Finally, a plot is created using lty=1 and a style in which nodes
are not shown, and the edges are straight (like in the original Minard
plot) rather than curved.
January Weiner
Charles Joseph Minard
# example how to convert data into a riverplot object
data(minard)
nodes <- minard$nodes
edges <- minard$edges
colnames(nodes) <- c("ID", "x", "y")
colnames(edges) <- c("N1", "N2", "Value", "direction")
# color the edges by troop movement direction
edges$col <- c("#e5cbaa", "black")[factor(edges$direction)]
# color edges by their color rather than by gradient between the nodes
# The "edgecol" column is interpreted as a style keyword with value "col"
edges$edgecol <- "col"
# generate the riverplot object and a style
river <- makeRiver(nodes, edges)
style <- list(edgestyle= "straight", nodestyle= "invisible")
# plot the generated object. Given that we want to plot the cities as well
# (external data), the user coordinates for the plot and for the external
# data should be the same. This is achieved by the adjust.usr option.
# Alternatively, one can call plot.new, set usr manually and call riverplot
# with the options rescale=FALSE and add=TRUE.
# plot_area parameter is for creating suitable margins within the plot area
par(bg="grey98", mar=rep(3,4))
plot(river, lty=1, default_style=style, plot_area=c(0.9, 0.7), adjust.usr=TRUE)
u <- par("usr")
rect(u[1], u[3], u[2], u[4])
# add latitude and longitude
abline(h=54:56, col="grey")
bglabel(u[1], 54:56, sprintf("%d°N", 54:56), pos="topright", bg=NA, col="grey", font=3)
lbl <- seq(20, 40, by=5)
abline(v=lbl, col="grey")
bglabel(lbl, u[3], sprintf("%d°E", lbl), pos="topright", bg=NA, col="grey", font=3)
# Add cities. Use "bglabel()" to have a background frame and better
# positioning.
with(minard$cities, points(Longitude, Latitude, pch=19))
with(minard$cities, bglabel(Longitude, Latitude, Name, pos="topright"))Please choose more modern alternatives, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.