How dare they! Well, actually, it’s a fun exercise. Declared by Tufte to be one of the best statistical graphics ever drawn, Joseph Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s march on Russia is definitely a classic (a copy hangs in my bathroom).

John Boykin recently took a crack at redesigning the classic, and goes into quite a bit of detail on his website about the choices he made:

John links to a series of other re-creations and re-interpretations of Minard’s dataset, as collected by Michael Friendly:

3D:

I particularly like this googlemap version:

And then there’s the executive summary version. Bwahahahahaha!

(via JunkCharts)