
W. E. B. Du Bois's Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life (2016) - catacombs
https://hyperallergic.com/306559/w-e-b-du-boiss-modernist-data-visualizations-of-black-life/
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ajstarks
Digital re-creations: [https://github.com/ajstarks/dubois-data-
portraits](https://github.com/ajstarks/dubois-data-portraits)

Presentation: [https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/recreating-the-dubois-
data-...](https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/recreating-the-dubois-data-
portraits)

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charlescearl
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.

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c3534l
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.

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monadic2
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.

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

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typon
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.

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

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monadic2
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.

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pvg
Previous thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524949)

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

Just Data Lab,
[https://www.thejustdatalab.com/team](https://www.thejustdatalab.com/team)

Data For Black Lives, [http://d4bl.org/](http://d4bl.org/)

Detroit Technology Project Data Justice
[https://detroitcommunitytech.org/?q=datajustice](https://detroitcommunitytech.org/?q=datajustice)

The COVID Racial Data Tracker,
[https://covidtracking.com/race](https://covidtracking.com/race)

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blululu
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.

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082349872349872
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](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)

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DanBC
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807)

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rak
There is a modern version in the works:
[https://www.blackbythenumbers.com/](https://www.blackbythenumbers.com/)

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dash2
These are really cool. It would be ace to write a ggplot theme for this style.

~~~
ajstarks
See:
[https://twitter.com/CharlieEatonPhD/status/12708573955105095...](https://twitter.com/CharlieEatonPhD/status/1270857395510509568?s=20)

