W.E.B. Du Bois’ Infographics
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The black and green chart about slavery is just incredible. With only 9 data points, he tells a moral story, he shares a perspective, and he educates the rest of the world on our peculiar institution. These visualizations are just incredible considering the tools they had to work with and the lack of formal data visualization science.
This isn't sarcasm, please explain what I'm missing.
Edit: This work is quite solid by the Tufte principles that I can see how to apply, such as using ink for data and not decoration.
For sharing information professionally? Not much - but you have to remember the context. Du Bois and his team were preparing these visualizations to be shown at the World Fair in Paris, not for a business meeting. As important as the data they portray is their underlying goal: to show that African-Americans are the equals of their European / Caucasian counterparts in cultural and intellectual endeavors. Presenting the ongoing socioeconomic plight of African-Americans as Modernist data art - at a time when Modernism itself was only just starting to spill over into the visual arts - definitely supports that goal.
Now, on to the visualization merits of the spiral. We have four data points spanning two orders of magnitude. To show those on a bar chart, you'd have to either: a) use a logarithmic scale, b) use a linear scale and accept that three of the bars are tiny, or c) use "scale breaks". Instead, Du Bois presents the data in a way that draws attention to the most prominent data point, while still preserving linear scale.
There are some highly effective techniques in the other visualizations as well. The property valuation chart uses annotations to provide narrative context. The freemen / slaves proportion chart uses filled-in space to lend it a stark visual weight that, again, speaks to the narrative impact. Data visualization is storytelling with data, and these charts are clearly designed to get their narrative point across - quite effectively, I'd say.
Finally: Tufte was printed in the 80s, nearly a full century after these visualizations. That, more than anything, makes these striking. With the exception of Playfair's charts, Oliver Byrne's treatment of Euclid's Elements, certain railroad timetables, and few others, the world hadn't seen much in the way of truly effective visualization. They were literally inventing effective visualization techniques. That we don't hear more about Du Bois' charts is unfortunate.
No, you probably shouldn't be learning from this design; it requires significant skill and imagination to deploy interpretive graphics like this. Stick with simple things.
> Observe how the data visualization starts out like a normal line graph and then sharply tangents off in a series of colors that end in a generous spiral of red. "It literally looks like a piece of Modernist art," says Rusert.
> The art of the data visualizations is partially what made the information so compelling. "We've now had it confirmed by a couple of different art historians that it seems like [Du Bois' team] were also developing novel and unique styles in order to grapple with and represent this data," says Rusert. Take the spiral design, she says. "it raises questions about why they were departing from these more geometric shapes in terms of representing data."
> To Rusert, there's a lot of intent that can be read within the way the information is translated through the drop of the red spiral. "It sort of a reminds me of lynching and forms of racist violence that were happening during the period," she says. "It also reflects something about just the surreal nature of segregation itself, and what it meant for African-Americans to be living within this kind of regime that was wholly irrational and was also backward looking not forward looking."
To me, the interesting thing about it is that it captures both the utilization of two dimensions of the paper/screen and the representation of a one-dimensional quantity. Humans are notoriously bad at intuitively translating among quantities of different dimensions, e.g. translating the area of a circle to a population.
Du Bois is a unique and towering intellectual in American history; his history of Reconstruction remains full of truths and understandings that our society has not yet absorbed. So I don't mean to diminish his work to note that these infographics exist in a context of other beautiful graphic design and infographics from the 19th century. Some examples:
Florence Nightingale: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/florence-nightingale-i...
1870 census: http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?9thcensus