W. E. B. Du Bois's Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life (2016) | Hacker News Reader

W. E. B. Du Bois's Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life (2016)

hyperallergic.com

103 pointscatacombs19 comments

Digital re-creations: https://github.com/ajstarks/dubois-data-portraits

Presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/recreating-the-dubois-data-...

Very cool, thank you for putting this together!

Beautiful! In the spirit of supporting Black devs and W.E.B., feel free to DM or post cashapp or other link. Or even even that of an organization if you prefer.

Wow, these are absolutely brilliant! I've seen some 1800s sociological charting before and it's not very interesting. They seemed to struggle with the idea of visualization at all and resorted to a lot of charts and tables that the reader was to study and interpret, on account of there not being a lot of statistics that were invented yet. These aren't just strangely modern, each one is wonderfully unique and artistic and would be delightfully creative on a modern data-driven site like 538 or in the New York Times. Maybe I just wasn't reading the best turn-of-the-century social science, which is not a field I'm an expert in, but these seem completely out of their time.

If anyone is interested in more of this there’s a beautiful, high quality book named “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits/Visualizing Black America/The color line at the turn of the twentieth century” edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert.

I bought a copy of this for Black History Month and really enjoyed it.

When everyone uses chart.js or bokeh or matplotlib, you don't really see graphs that go out of the normal range of visualizations supported by these libraries. In a way the ability to use generic code hampers creativity because it's easy to find a "good enough solution" to your problems.

Are these really 'generic' though? d3.js is and people make all sorts of zany visualizations with it.

I wouldn’t categorize it as technically generic, just culturally. d3.js is incredibly flexible but I can’t count how many d3 graphs I’ve stepped through with the exact same spacing algorithms and interface.

That's probably a good thing. These "creative" graphs are interesting to look at, but most are useless for actually comparing information. A standard visual language for charts is a positive thing.

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524949

Organizations now carrying on the work of documenting Black life through the data science lens include:

Just Data Lab, https://www.thejustdatalab.com/team

Data For Black Lives, http://d4bl.org/

Detroit Technology Project Data Justice https://detroitcommunitytech.org/?q=datajustice

The COVID Racial Data Tracker, https://covidtracking.com/race

It's always fascinating to see historical data visualizations. History is a great antidote against the bias toward the current era. I feel like Ed Tufte would tear some of these graphics to shreds, but collectively the presentation manages to tell a powerful story.

Yes, they really are fascinating. Some are wildly confusing, but really interesting and modern as graphic design. Some are pretty good at communicating information. I think the ones selected here (from the full set at loc.gov) tend to be the more "modern" ones.

It's not only HN which has been affected by George Floyd. I ran across the following modern visualisation on a site which normally runs container shipping news.

https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#timelapse

One can clearly see the British slave trade dry up post 1815. (on a site normally dealing with maritime issues, I see Lloyd's of London have apologised for their work insuring these voyages)

That's a great visualisation.

It's useful to read this wikipedia article in combination with the visualisation to see when various laws were introduced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807

There is a modern version in the works: https://www.blackbythenumbers.com/

These are really cool. It would be ace to write a ggplot theme for this style.

See: https://twitter.com/CharlieEatonPhD/status/12708573955105095...

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