Everybody knows that Napoleon’s Russian Campaign led to the greatest info chart in history …
read: Russian Campaign for details.
My challenge, especially to Mohfte (@Mohammad) and Wellufte (@well-noted) folk, is …
HOW might one generate this kind of mutli-index-image in TW?
Just asking
TT
I’d probably have a JS which processes data from a json tiddler. The only problem I can see really is that the logic might only render this very specific type of chart 
An interesting idea for a plugin would be “charts” that would use this strategy to allow the user to create any of a dozen types of charts using some kind of graphical UI, rather than having to enter the raw data.
Anything like that already exist?
As a generic approach to multi-dimensional data? We don’t, I believe.
I agree with Tufte and many other commentators that this is a brilliant visualization. But it’s brilliant in good part because of its unique nature.
Sure, we could build something that also showed the shifting size of an army as it advanced then retreated across certain terrain, with reference to the temperatures encountered along the way and various landmarks they passed. We could probably make it passably similar to Minard’s map.
But that is a very small niche indeed.
I’m sure it would be possible to build tools that would allow us to combine multiple data-sets and some instructions to make for some fairly interesting visualizations. But I would expect that this would at most be something that we could integrate with TW, and not particularly something we would make TW-native. The data could be stored in TW tiddlers as hash-maps or tables. The configuration information could be stored in fields in a plain tiddler, or in some nested format in a JSON tiddler. But none of that really captures the creativity necessary to create such a masterpiece; it’s just basic infrastructure.
The creativity involved strikes me as independent of the mechanism. If we had some strongly interconnected data and wanted to present it in many different ways, then there are definitely some possibilities. But I think TW would help mostly at the margins.
I’d love to be proven wrong. And @Springer, who is typing at the same time I am, has frequently proven me wrong. But I won’t believe it until I see it.
There is a lot of unwriten data in that graph, I suggest just paste the image 
otherwise find the source data or a small subset to use seperatly.
… The thing is, that chart is the product of brilliant purpose-specific information design. I don’t think it generalizes very well. The technical aspects pale in comparison to the conceptual work of getting the variables neatly defined and seeing how variables such as color, line-thickness, and temperature-graph can map into a shared space.
A nice segue here is Tufte… who loved this map/chart.
But as we’re noticing over at the Tufte notes thread, it’s very hard to know in advance of use-case details what kind of alignments (sizes, colors, block positioning) make sense. Commentary surrounded by white-space in margins works great when commentary/notes tend to be more concise than the original main text. Such a solution isn’t going to scale well for, say, layers of midrashim (Jewish interpretation/commentary on Torah and other canonical texts).
I think the thing about a good design professional — whether it’s in print media, charts, maps, or whatever — is the ability to engage in a back-and-forth process that moves from provisional data format to tentative layout, and back to rethinking/scaling and tinkering with layout, based on what comes across cleanly.
I’m quite intrigued by the question of how to nudge TW toward a more spatially savvy field of objects, with something like intuitive lines of ordered and non-ordered connection among objects.
I’d be thrilled with this starting-point: Get something like the event-catcher canvas to allow for “smart” lines that keep elements connected even as they’re dragged around (rather than having arrows be themselves additional objects that need to be separately re-oriented when the things they point to move).
But bear in mind this stuff is the kind of challenge that major paid graphic-design software solves with tons of code. Getting complex things to look simple is … complex!
Sure, there have been various charts-oriented integrations/plugins. You might start here:
Also this:
and check out these examples:
