The Story of the Second Punic War
I love history, but I find it difficult to remember all the details. That’s mostly the way it’s taught and presented. Lectures, lots of reading, lists of names and dates, facts and figures.
But all of that can be told visually as a data story! And that makes it easier to remember and understand.
So, here’s my contribution for Storytelling month at Tableau Public. I’ve always been fascinated by how close Hannibal came to conquering the Roman Republic. I’ve thought repeatedly about crating a dashboard to explore the battle of Cannae (ever since reading Cannae by Adrian Goldsworthy.) With Tableau Stories, telling the story just got a lot easier.
By the way, did you know that Charles Minard plotted Hannibal’s invasion of Italy?
Of course you did. But I didn’t, until after I had created the dashboard. Of course, I was inspired by his more famous visualization of Napoleon’s March. And his representations are much more precise than mine. I went for accuracy, but was a little loose with precision (especially latitudes and longitudes — in other words don’t use my numbers for your doctoral dissertation).
And here it is:
(I’ll come back to Tic Tac Toe, I promise!)
Joshua Milligan is a five-time Tableau Zen Master. His passion is training, mentoring, and helping people gain insights and make decisions based on their data through data visualization using Tableau.
