The Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 22

Fig. 1.8 Minard's map (Courtesy of http://www.napoleonic-literature.com )

information, but also provide a means of recognizing patterns and relationships at
various levels, which in turn can greatly help us prioritize our search strategies.
Mapping scientific frontiers is to take a step further. The focus is no longer an
isolated body of information. Instead, we are interested in the information conveyed
by the holistic patterns at various levels.
The crucial element in visual thinking is a metaphor that can accommodate
the meaning of individual visual-spatial attributes and form a holistic image.
Sometimes the presence of such metaphors is implicit; sometimes the absence of
such metaphors is obvious. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Hermes
is the messenger of the gods and he brings a word from the realm of the wordless.
A message in a bottle is an ancient way of communicating. Human beings have put
all sorts of “messages” in a wide variety of “bottles”, ranging from a bottle in the
ocean to Pioneer's gold plaque in deep space.

1.2.2 Famous Maps

One picture is worth of thousands of words. A classic example is the compelling
story-telling map by Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870). This famous map depicts
the retreat of Napoleon's army in 1812. It communicates a variety of information
to the viewer. For example, the size of the French army is shown as the width of
the bands. The army's location is shown on the two-dimensional map, including the
direction of the movement of the advance (upper band) and retreat (lower band).
The temperature on certain dates during the retreat is shown in association with a
chart below the map (Fig. 1.8 ).
The size of Napoleon's army is shown as the width of the band in the map,
starting on the Russian-Polish border with 422,000 soldiers. By the time they
reached Moscow in September, the size of the army dropped to 100,000. Eventually