How To Read This Chart: Visualizing world geography for the worst reason imaginable ~ INFO IMAGES

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By Philip Bump

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Since you are reading a newsletter centered on data visualization, I will assume that you've probably come across this image before.

Charles Minard's 1869 map of Napoleon's attempted invasion of Russia. (Wikimedia Commons)

That is a visualization created by Charles Minard in 1869, showing Napoleon Bonaparte's 1812 attempt to capture Moscow with French forces. The tan line shows France's initial invasion, the width of the line indicating the number of soldiers involved in the effort. As the column moves east — to the right, on the diagram — groups break off to engage Russian forces in other cities. But the important pattern is that the tan line narrows: France begins hemorrhaging soldiers. The black line that begins after arrival at Moscow shows the French retreat, with different points in that departure connected to the graph at the bottom that shows how temperatures were falling.

The black line arrives back at Russia's western border pencil-thin. Napoleon's invasion became a history lesson and Minard's depiction of it a hallmark of how to depict complex information elegantly.

In the current moment, of course, it's a reminder of something else entirely.

Russia's invasion, launched in earnest on Wednesday night, forced international audiences to rapidly get up to speed on the geography of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin at first focused his country's attention on two regions in eastern Ukraine in which Russia had for years backed separatist groups. But as the invasion began with a series of airstrikes, it quickly became apparent that Russia was engaged in a countrywide attack. Understanding the importance of reports of explosions in Kharkiv, Lviv and Kyiv meant understanding that those cities sat well outside the purportedly contested regions.

By Thursday morning, The Washington Post's map of the incursion made very clear very quickly the scale of what was underway.

The Washington Post's map of the invasion of Ukraine, as of Thursday morning.

We don't often think of maps as data visualization but, of course, they are. They are geographic data, visualized; they are community data and infrastructural data made visually obvious. In this context, they are conduits for information about war. The Minard diagram isn't a traditional map but it is a map nonetheless; it uses geographic positioning to tell a story.

In past conflicts, maps have been instrumental for explaining what's happening. During World War II, newspapers frequently carried large maps on their front pages, showing how Allied forces were pressuring Nazi Germany and its allies. Here, for example, is an Associated Press map that was published in 1944, showing the path of bombers from Britain toward the Soviet Union — toward what is now Ukraine.

Associated Press map shown in the Tampa Tribune, June 23, 1944. (Newspapers.com)

For a reader at home, that map conveyed the immediate news story — the novel deployment from the U.K. to the U.S.S.R. — while also explaining the orientation of those countries relative to the target, Berlin.

Here's another example of how maps convey useful information related to the war in Ukraine. Policy expert Patrick Chovanec used a color-coded map of the country to show the varying geographic constraints an invading force might encounter. While modern air warfare and the presence of a modern highway network reduce the need for such considerations, it does provide a good sense of how the invasion might further progress.

The combination of technology and mapping also revealed real-time information about the invasion as it got underway, with apparent checkpoints showing up on Google as traffic jams.

There are other ways to understand the geography of Ukraine that are more subtle and that don't involve maps. For example, as I watched CNN's coverage of the first hours of the war on Wednesday night, I noticed that dawn was breaking behind the network's correspondents at different times. Jim Sciutto, at lower right below, was stationed in Lviv. Clarissa Ward, third from the left in the top row, was in Kharkiv. The sun was up there, in the country's northeast, but Lviv, near its western edge, was still dark.

That small detail gave a sense both of positioning and of the breadth of the country.

Still from CNN early Thursday morning. (TVEyes)

There are lots of ways to learn the details of a country's geography. War is unquestionably the worst one.

A diversion from the grimness

Mark MacKinnon is a senior international correspondent for the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail. When Russia began attacking Kyiv on Wednesday night, he and other reporters took shelter in the basement of the hotel in which they were staying. He tweeted a photo of the scenario.

From there, he covered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's speech encouraging his countrymen to stay strong. And, with reporting opportunities limited, he did what thousands of other people would do.

He played Wordle.

He did fairly well, too. In a past newsletter, I discussed the compact utility of Wordle's visualization of a player's success. MacKinnon got it in three, which is quite respectable.

I mention this not in any way to criticize MacKinnon. Instead, we should appreciate that, in that tense moment, he did what any of us would do: he distracted himself with something he enjoyed. It's entirely human and entirely relatable. And it's a way for me to rationalize deploying the same distraction from the same dire news.

So let's talk briefly about Wordle.

In late January, we learned that the New York Times was buying the once-independent game. By early February, it had been ported over to the Times's website entirely, including its existing list of words. And shortly after that happened, complaints began.

Last week, there was a low rumble of annoyance at the words that were coming up (there's a new one each day) and some speculation that the Times had cranked up a big dial labeled "difficulty" for unclear reasons. The allegation didn't make much sense; after spending seven figures to acquire the game, why would the Times try to drive people away from it?

My initial speculation was just that the Times acquisition increased awareness of Wordle and so some people jumped into it for the first time — to discover that it was harder than they thought. But then I put on my data-visualization hat, and realized I could analyze the list of words to see if the game had actually gotten harder.

And it had.

First, how to read the chart. Each dot shows the calculated difficulty of a Wordle word on any given day, using analysis from Twinword. A word with the score of 1 is determined by Twinword to be more difficult based on frequency of usage and appearance on standardized tests. The line shows the weekly average of all seven Wordle words.

As you can see, the weekly average when the game transitioned to the Times was 0.223. In the week after, the week when the complaints emerged, it jumped to 0.51. It got harder.

Familiarity with the word is one thing. But the game is made harder by words that have recurring characters, making it trickier to both guess and locate proper letter positions. So I also looked at the number of unique characters in the words for any given week, with an average of five meaning that each word that week used five distinct characters. Here, too, I discovered that the game had gotten harder, with the average number of unique characters in the week's words dropping.

You'll notice, by the way, that each of those graphs projects into the future. You can see not what upcoming words will be included but how difficult future weeks will be. Assuming the Times doesn't change the word list (which it hasn't so far), the week of May 29 is going to be a difficult one.

You know, on the scale of "how hard a distracting bit of entertainment might be." Not on the scale of "foreign correspondent seeking shelter from incoming missiles." And with that bit of chiding, our pleasant distraction from the grim realities of the world comes to an end.