Black Data:
W.E.B. Du Bois and Data Visualization
JASON FORREST with SILAS MUNRO
Known for being a prolific author, renowned sociologist, fierce civil rights advocate for people of color, founder of the NAACP, and historian, WEB Du Bois was also a pioneer of data visualization. The American Negro was one initiative of the United States Exhibition to a global audience at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Du Bois was part of a collective of black intellectuals and professionals who contributed to a multidisciplinary display representing the best of African American advancement at the turn of the century. A cornerstone of the exhibit was The Georgia Negro, a set of 63 brightly-colored diagrams visualizing a sociological study by Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University. The dataset made arguments in visual form for the equality and sophistication of black Americans. Du Bois and his team generated avant-garde graphics 20 years before the founding of the Bauhaus. Du Bois and his collaborator's work is a prototypical case study of design for social innovation, decolonized design pedagogy, and expanded practice.
RESOURCES
BOOKS
- W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America by The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
- The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
- The Philadelphia Negro by W. E. B. Du Bois
- A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress by David Levering Lewis
- Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
- Design, Writing, Research: Writing on Graphic Design by Ellen Lupton and Abbot Miller
- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome
Women and Queer Radicals
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
- Data Action: Using Data for Public Good
- Race After the Internet by Lisa Nakamura
ARTICLES & LINKS
RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
PEOPLE
- It’s Time to Throw the Bauhaus Under the Bus workshop by Letterform Archive
- Using Our History to Preserve Our Future by AMISTAD RESEARCH CENTER
- Root Cause Research Centre headed up by Jessica Bellamy
- Nightingale the Journal of the Data Visualization Society
- Historical Viz Digest: Issue 5
- African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition
- The Wilmington Coup D'état of 1898
- The Hampton Album 44 photographs by Frances B. Johnston from an album of Hampton Institute with an introduction and a note on the photographer by Lincoln Kirstein
- Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Album: A Researcher’s Exploration
- Gannett Maps in the LOC
PEOPLE
W.E.B. DU BOIS
DATA PORTRAITS
BLACK IN DATA
DATA PORTRAITS
- W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (Part 1)
- Data Journalism in the study of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Negro Problem” (Part 2)
- Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations (Part 3)
- Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original W.E.B. Du Bois Data Visualization (Part 4)
- Contemporary Du Bois Viz
- Original vs Contemporary Version of Plate 31
- Contemporary Version of Plate 27
BLACK IN DATA