Mapping multivariate data over time is a challenge for cartography. In this presentation I review two techniques that perhaps haven’t seen as much love as they deserve and show how we might dust them off for a new generation of map-makers. They are demonstrated through a re-imagination of two cartographic classics: Charles Minard’s Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813 (1869) and Florence Nightingale’s Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East (1858).

Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand proposed the space-time cube (STC) as a framework for studying interaction and movement of individuals in space and time in 1970. Since, we’ve seen sporadic use of the technique due to construction and usability difficulties. Here, we show how to construct a STC in ArcGIS and publish directly to a 3D interactive web scene in a way that overcomes many of the difficulties. Exploring the famous Minard map of Napoleon’s march through the medium of a space-time cube may offer us new insights into the data and add something to a visualization that is already hailed as being beyond improvement.

Florence Nightingale, a British nurse in the Crimean War some 150 years ago, worked to improve sanitary conditions in military hospitals. Her reports included rose diagrams (colloquially referred to as a coxcomb) - an efficient, elegant way of representing the causes of mortality in the British army that supported multiple comparisons. Here, we explore the structure of the coxcomb and introduce a tool to create data-driven, spatially located coxcombs as features using ArcGIS.

Now that technology is catching up with these techniques it’s time that we, as cartographers, put them to work.