Le système Minard

Description

The Minard System by Sandra Rendgen is the first book to bring together the complete collection of Charles-Joseph Minard's statistical maps held at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. This civil engineer, born in 1781, was a pioneer in the field of visual representation of statistical data. This book sheds light on the history of this self-taught cartographer, whose maps and representations were a milestone in the way data were modeled in the social sciences. Le Sytème Minard is a unique historical document, translated for the first time into French.
These graphic representations of diverse data are a real lesson in graphic design, at a time when the political stakes of data visualization are gaining visibility. Best known for his map of the Russian campaign (see below), which represents in an avant-garde way the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in Russia as a function of the distance traveled and the temperatures felt, the book also shows a more confidential aspect of Minard's work.
Passionate about the economic and territorial changes of his time, Minard documents through his maps and graphic representations the upheavals brought about by the recent industrial revolution and the beginnings of globalization. In a preface written specifically for the French edition, Joost Grootens, one of the most recognized cartographic scholars of his generation, draws on his experience in the field of representation to shed contemporary light on Minard's influence on his discipline.
This book restores the importance of a discipline too often minimized in the field of humanities, and echoes several titles published by B42 on the subject ? From Hieroglyphics to Isotype by Otto Neurath, The Color Line by W. E. B. Du Bois, Terra Forma and Visualization by Johanna Drucker.