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W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics--beautiful in design and powerful in content--make visible a wide spectrum of black experience.
W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."
W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."
144 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2018
136 people are currently reading
1482 people want to read
About the author
Whitney Battle-Baptiste
2 books4 followersWhitney Battle-Baptiste is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is the author of Black Feminist Archaeology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
October 10, 2019
Five stars for several reasons, the least being the fact that it is about data visualization.
I've had this book out for over three weeks now, and finally got to reading the essays that introduce it. The essays are good (although a little repetitive; difficult when you have three of them) and do a great job of describing the historical context in which these data visualizations were made. Du Bois's place in field of sociology and the remarkable effect he and his partner made in getting this project completed and installed in the 1900 Paris Exposition can't be understated. Actually, it is mind-blowing when I think about the fact that it was 1900 not 1990 …
I especially appreciated the short essay by Mabel O. Wilson, who places the importance of Du Bois's opening plate into the use of cartography at that historical moment. That plate, The Georgia Negro: A Social Study is a striking compression of 400 years of history, of a forced diaspora. Along with that plate, I am also in awe of plate Valuation of Town and City Property Owned by Georgia Negores. in which societal events are carefully entered into the curve of the data, making the association between the event and the data distressingly apparent.
Visually, Du Bois and his team made some striking graphics, my favorite being City and Rural Population. 1890. I love the spiral.
Well worth taking some time to review.
I've had this book out for over three weeks now, and finally got to reading the essays that introduce it. The essays are good (although a little repetitive; difficult when you have three of them) and do a great job of describing the historical context in which these data visualizations were made. Du Bois's place in field of sociology and the remarkable effect he and his partner made in getting this project completed and installed in the 1900 Paris Exposition can't be understated. Actually, it is mind-blowing when I think about the fact that it was 1900 not 1990 …
I especially appreciated the short essay by Mabel O. Wilson, who places the importance of Du Bois's opening plate into the use of cartography at that historical moment. That plate, The Georgia Negro: A Social Study is a striking compression of 400 years of history, of a forced diaspora. Along with that plate, I am also in awe of plate Valuation of Town and City Property Owned by Georgia Negores. in which societal events are carefully entered into the curve of the data, making the association between the event and the data distressingly apparent.
Visually, Du Bois and his team made some striking graphics, my favorite being City and Rural Population. 1890. I love the spiral.
Well worth taking some time to review.
August 25, 2021
Lots of infographics that are cool both for their contents but also as a time capsule of this form of information visualization from over 100 years ago
April 6, 2020
It was a joy to finally digest Du Bois's extensive 1900 data portraits and visualizations IN FULL. For the last 2-3 years, I had seen these portraits scattered around the internet and also picked up this book to gaze at the pages. But finally, I have consumed them in full book form. I am still astonished by how protomodernist these portraits were to the fields of sociology and graphic/visual design. The book mentions that Du Bois + his Atlanta University students, in making these visualizations, predated Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism.
The downside of this text though is its redundancy & lack of critical or interesting debate and analysis. There are about 25 or so pages at the beginning of the book that includes the introduction by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert + two small essays by Aldon Morris & Mabel O. Wilson that are just....boring. I understand the function of this book is mainly to prioritize the extensive visual wit and social data compilation of the portraits but I expected some better writing to frame the visual experience.
I will say I did have a moment with this book as an object -- toward the last quarter of reading, I felt a few pages getting thicker and at first ignored it until it appeared some of the creeks of the book were still printed together (shame on the PRINCETON Architectural Press). I had to literally rip the pages from each other — A kind of breaching, breaking, a resilience that was akin to these portraits being heavily induced by Pan-African theories + the self-determination of black folk making their way through a treacherous American landscape.
The downside of this text though is its redundancy & lack of critical or interesting debate and analysis. There are about 25 or so pages at the beginning of the book that includes the introduction by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert + two small essays by Aldon Morris & Mabel O. Wilson that are just....boring. I understand the function of this book is mainly to prioritize the extensive visual wit and social data compilation of the portraits but I expected some better writing to frame the visual experience.
I will say I did have a moment with this book as an object -- toward the last quarter of reading, I felt a few pages getting thicker and at first ignored it until it appeared some of the creeks of the book were still printed together (shame on the PRINCETON Architectural Press). I had to literally rip the pages from each other — A kind of breaching, breaking, a resilience that was akin to these portraits being heavily induced by Pan-African theories + the self-determination of black folk making their way through a treacherous American landscape.
January 21, 2023
Beautifully rendered book with wonderful photographs of the data visualizations Du Bois and his team created. It was fascinating from the perspective of data visualizations and informative about race in America. The text was so-so, but the visualizations make the book worth the read.
June 6, 2019
This book is a fascinating snapshot of a particular moment in time - Paris, 1900. During that time it documents how W.E.B. Du Bois used empirical data to shatter the dominant racial paradigm of the time that Blacks were a degenerate race, incapable of “advancement “ and doomed to evolutionary degeneration. Using Georgia as a focal point Du Bois and his team from Atlanta University showed the progress freed slaves and their children had made in the 35 years since emancipation.
As important as the facts were Du Bois keyed in on an important point - numbers alone will not sell the story, and therefore this book is also about the power and poetry present within data visualization. The authors explicitly tie in the ahead of its time art and design of the 1900 exhibit to the explanatory narrative of Du Bois, and in doing so show how today’s BLM data visualizations have their spiritual, epistemological, and artistic roots in the works of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Tl:Dr come for the data biz, stay for the history
As important as the facts were Du Bois keyed in on an important point - numbers alone will not sell the story, and therefore this book is also about the power and poetry present within data visualization. The authors explicitly tie in the ahead of its time art and design of the 1900 exhibit to the explanatory narrative of Du Bois, and in doing so show how today’s BLM data visualizations have their spiritual, epistemological, and artistic roots in the works of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Tl:Dr come for the data biz, stay for the history
January 30, 2021
made me want to make graphs
October 18, 2021
Beautiful data displays with rich description of their original contexts and what they were arguing for.
July 21, 2022
a brilliant way to approach data visualization, influencing my data work today!
December 4, 2024
Stunning
February 17, 2021
The graphics are a fascinating glimpse into Du Bois's work and the state of data visualization around 1900.
The three introductory essays help explain this work in the context of the time. Du Bois and his colleagues prepared these graphics for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, specifically for the "American Negro Exhibit" using the terminology of the time. The essays point out that Du Bois wanted the exhibit to convey the impressive gains (in education, wealth, land owned, etc.) made by Black Americans since the end of slavery. Moreso, he wanted to challenge the commonly-held view that any gains were *thanks to* the benevolent help of whites, rather than *despite* the persistence of white supremacy.
The data visualizations themselves are well worth a look. Some of them might be made quite differently today, but as a set they clearly convey the creativity and breadth of Du Bois and his team. (If you're a dataviz practitioner like me, you might be interested in the 2021 #tidytuesday challenge of recreating Du Bois's graphs in modern software.)
The captions accompanying each graph are ... well, they clearly come from someone who looks at dataviz very differently than I do. Silas Munro seems to be the author of the captions.
-- Sometimes the captions point out really interesting context that I did not know about and would have missed. E.g. in plate 36, they mention some history that may explain why the town of Darien, Georgia was chosen for this case study. In plate 53, they mention that the typography used here "would later become a hallmark of 1920s Russian constructivism" etc.
-- But in other times they seem to miss the mark from a modern dataviz perspective. E.g. in plate 38, they say that throughout these plates, darker and more saturated colors are used for higher values of the statistics---but while this is a best practice, it is not actually true of the figure in plate 38, nor of others such as plate 2.
Even if I disagree with a couple of the captions, this is a beautiful and important book.
The three introductory essays help explain this work in the context of the time. Du Bois and his colleagues prepared these graphics for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, specifically for the "American Negro Exhibit" using the terminology of the time. The essays point out that Du Bois wanted the exhibit to convey the impressive gains (in education, wealth, land owned, etc.) made by Black Americans since the end of slavery. Moreso, he wanted to challenge the commonly-held view that any gains were *thanks to* the benevolent help of whites, rather than *despite* the persistence of white supremacy.
The data visualizations themselves are well worth a look. Some of them might be made quite differently today, but as a set they clearly convey the creativity and breadth of Du Bois and his team. (If you're a dataviz practitioner like me, you might be interested in the 2021 #tidytuesday challenge of recreating Du Bois's graphs in modern software.)
The captions accompanying each graph are ... well, they clearly come from someone who looks at dataviz very differently than I do. Silas Munro seems to be the author of the captions.
-- Sometimes the captions point out really interesting context that I did not know about and would have missed. E.g. in plate 36, they mention some history that may explain why the town of Darien, Georgia was chosen for this case study. In plate 53, they mention that the typography used here "would later become a hallmark of 1920s Russian constructivism" etc.
-- But in other times they seem to miss the mark from a modern dataviz perspective. E.g. in plate 38, they say that throughout these plates, darker and more saturated colors are used for higher values of the statistics---but while this is a best practice, it is not actually true of the figure in plate 38, nor of others such as plate 2.
Even if I disagree with a couple of the captions, this is a beautiful and important book.
December 25, 2020
An eye-opening book, “W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Portraits” outlines the work he did to statistiacally characterize and visualize “The American Negro”, as a population, for an exhibit in Paris at the turn of the century. Du Bois, who was the first African American man to earn a doctorate from Harvard, in sociology, with supporting graduate degrees that focused on empirical methods and statistical analysis, was compelled to assemble this work to refute the the prominent social darwinist theories of the era, which claimed that African Americans were “unfit” and would not thrive in the United States.
Being predicated on social Darwinism, a gross mischaracterization of the notions of selection (which itself has been mostly ill-understood and ill-defined for much fo the past 100 years, until the era of bioinformatics), these notions leaned less on empirical data, and more on general propositions connected to incidental observations made by Europeans during their “age of exploration” era. Thus, much of the social Darwinist theories held an explicit link between geography and “fitness”, and as this book notes, often linked differential “fitness” and “levels of civilization” to certain regions in the globe. In this way, social Darwinists supposed there exist a deterministic theory where temperature, topography, and other elements of the land informed the ultimate “evolution” of the group that lived on that land. Although a simplistic notion to modern eyes, the search for simplicity and broad macro drivers was thought to be the best way to understand nature by many prominent scientists and thinkers at the time (using the success of physics as an example).
It is in this light, that W.E.B Du Bois sought to use data, and not just theory, to refute these claims, and show how the African American population has actually thrived despite suffering slavary, Jim Crow, and other material and psychological indignities for the previous 200 years. In doing this project, it seems to me at least, that W.E.B. Du Bois was probably the first American Data Scientist. Within the prints, we see examples of a variety of visualizations, including conditioning line charts on events, to show potential correlations on the observational data his team was collecting, a wide variety of geo-spatial visualizations that mapped various socio-economic/demographic factors via color/icons onto the plot, experimentations on how to visualize correlations, and a few experiments with mosaic plots.
As a data scientist working in the modern context, I can’t imagine how challenging it must have been to assemble this data, which included both census data he received from the US gov’t, and samples he procured through field work, then analyze it by hand-and-paper, then actually produce the visualizations, again by hand. To put this work into context, it predates the grandfather of data visualization, Edward Tufte, by several decades, it’s a decade or two after John Snow’s work that visualized and identified the vector for Cholera in the London Outbreak of the mid 1850s, and about 70 years after the discovery of the Gauss-Markov axioms that informed the theory of linear regression. Thus, Du Bois’ application and visualization of statistics on socioeconomic data fits right in with the first generation of pioneers in statistics and data analysis.
The book itself is short, with a little less than half of the text dedicated to outlining W.E.B Du Bois as a person and his professional/academic work, the rest displays facsimiles of the original prints of his team’s visualization. In a way this book could serve both as a quick introduction to his data work, but also as an attractive “coffee book” table (if you purchased the physical copy). Having both the physical and digital copy, I found the colors to be more vibrant on the digital one. Either way, the book should help point people to further books on Du Bois’ work if they choose to go deeper.
As a data scientist, this book, like many books on data visualization, are good to read and stare at, as often we only think of visualizations in some narrow/constricted way (as a work product or artifact we need to produce). It’s good to see how data visualization can inform and guide your analysis, and how, without fancy data-mining algorithms, one may judiciously use intuition gleaned from carefully selected visualizations to inform next-steps in your analysis. Great short book, both for people interested in the history of data, and/or W.E.B. Du Bois’ contribution to it. Highly recommended.
Being predicated on social Darwinism, a gross mischaracterization of the notions of selection (which itself has been mostly ill-understood and ill-defined for much fo the past 100 years, until the era of bioinformatics), these notions leaned less on empirical data, and more on general propositions connected to incidental observations made by Europeans during their “age of exploration” era. Thus, much of the social Darwinist theories held an explicit link between geography and “fitness”, and as this book notes, often linked differential “fitness” and “levels of civilization” to certain regions in the globe. In this way, social Darwinists supposed there exist a deterministic theory where temperature, topography, and other elements of the land informed the ultimate “evolution” of the group that lived on that land. Although a simplistic notion to modern eyes, the search for simplicity and broad macro drivers was thought to be the best way to understand nature by many prominent scientists and thinkers at the time (using the success of physics as an example).
It is in this light, that W.E.B Du Bois sought to use data, and not just theory, to refute these claims, and show how the African American population has actually thrived despite suffering slavary, Jim Crow, and other material and psychological indignities for the previous 200 years. In doing this project, it seems to me at least, that W.E.B. Du Bois was probably the first American Data Scientist. Within the prints, we see examples of a variety of visualizations, including conditioning line charts on events, to show potential correlations on the observational data his team was collecting, a wide variety of geo-spatial visualizations that mapped various socio-economic/demographic factors via color/icons onto the plot, experimentations on how to visualize correlations, and a few experiments with mosaic plots.
As a data scientist working in the modern context, I can’t imagine how challenging it must have been to assemble this data, which included both census data he received from the US gov’t, and samples he procured through field work, then analyze it by hand-and-paper, then actually produce the visualizations, again by hand. To put this work into context, it predates the grandfather of data visualization, Edward Tufte, by several decades, it’s a decade or two after John Snow’s work that visualized and identified the vector for Cholera in the London Outbreak of the mid 1850s, and about 70 years after the discovery of the Gauss-Markov axioms that informed the theory of linear regression. Thus, Du Bois’ application and visualization of statistics on socioeconomic data fits right in with the first generation of pioneers in statistics and data analysis.
The book itself is short, with a little less than half of the text dedicated to outlining W.E.B Du Bois as a person and his professional/academic work, the rest displays facsimiles of the original prints of his team’s visualization. In a way this book could serve both as a quick introduction to his data work, but also as an attractive “coffee book” table (if you purchased the physical copy). Having both the physical and digital copy, I found the colors to be more vibrant on the digital one. Either way, the book should help point people to further books on Du Bois’ work if they choose to go deeper.
As a data scientist, this book, like many books on data visualization, are good to read and stare at, as often we only think of visualizations in some narrow/constricted way (as a work product or artifact we need to produce). It’s good to see how data visualization can inform and guide your analysis, and how, without fancy data-mining algorithms, one may judiciously use intuition gleaned from carefully selected visualizations to inform next-steps in your analysis. Great short book, both for people interested in the history of data, and/or W.E.B. Du Bois’ contribution to it. Highly recommended.
July 3, 2024
This is an amazing book on many levels. I read the hardcover edition, and you should too, because the graphic design of the book, designed to show off the intricate design work done by DuBois and his students at Atlanta University, is a visual pleasure.
The late 19th and early 20th Century were replete with World's Fairs and Expositions, and they featured educational exhibits by leading scholars; this is the reproduction of the exhibit from the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris called the "American Negro Exhibit". It was organized by Thomas Junius Calloway, editor of the Colored American newspaper in Washington, DC. It included contributions by other intellectuals and Universities, and a display of books written by African Americans, but the centerpiece was the sociological examination of Blacks in the U.S. in the years since the end of the Civil War. DuBois worked from two of his own works, a study of Georgia, a study of Philadelphia, and general demographics for the whole United States. The material is now housed at the Library of Congress, and reproducing the data visualizations with 21st Century data would be a fascinating piece of work.
The statistics are interesting, and go a long way towards DuBois' goal of countering the current scientific thinking of the time, that members of the African race were somehow inferior. This was a justification for colonialism and slavery, but many saw it as fact. By demonstrating how African-Americans, once freed, had advanced in home ownership, land ownership, and participation in various economic endeavors, he hoped to paint a very different picture.
Now, in the computer generation, we are used to data visualizations, and to the collection and use of demographic information by many social scientists, but in the 1900s, this was new, and the Atlanta University team had to invent graphic styles and visualizations to convey a lot of information in the short period of time any visitor might spend in the exhibit. They predate the German Bauhaus school and other creators of graphic design, and they are unique and beautiful. Many of them, especially the spiral graphs, could be used as works of art. And keep in mind, Excel users, they were all done by hand.
For anyone interested in graphic art, social sciences, sociology, or Black History, this book is a must read and it should be in every library. It has a lot to grab the interest of high school and college students as well. The book begins with a few essays about the Exhibition, and concludes with full page, full color reproductions of the exhibit drawings. Because of the use of shape and color, unique to this project at the time, you can understand the content without reading the notes, but the notes are also helpful.
Brilliant. Take a look.
The late 19th and early 20th Century were replete with World's Fairs and Expositions, and they featured educational exhibits by leading scholars; this is the reproduction of the exhibit from the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris called the "American Negro Exhibit". It was organized by Thomas Junius Calloway, editor of the Colored American newspaper in Washington, DC. It included contributions by other intellectuals and Universities, and a display of books written by African Americans, but the centerpiece was the sociological examination of Blacks in the U.S. in the years since the end of the Civil War. DuBois worked from two of his own works, a study of Georgia, a study of Philadelphia, and general demographics for the whole United States. The material is now housed at the Library of Congress, and reproducing the data visualizations with 21st Century data would be a fascinating piece of work.
The statistics are interesting, and go a long way towards DuBois' goal of countering the current scientific thinking of the time, that members of the African race were somehow inferior. This was a justification for colonialism and slavery, but many saw it as fact. By demonstrating how African-Americans, once freed, had advanced in home ownership, land ownership, and participation in various economic endeavors, he hoped to paint a very different picture.
Now, in the computer generation, we are used to data visualizations, and to the collection and use of demographic information by many social scientists, but in the 1900s, this was new, and the Atlanta University team had to invent graphic styles and visualizations to convey a lot of information in the short period of time any visitor might spend in the exhibit. They predate the German Bauhaus school and other creators of graphic design, and they are unique and beautiful. Many of them, especially the spiral graphs, could be used as works of art. And keep in mind, Excel users, they were all done by hand.
For anyone interested in graphic art, social sciences, sociology, or Black History, this book is a must read and it should be in every library. It has a lot to grab the interest of high school and college students as well. The book begins with a few essays about the Exhibition, and concludes with full page, full color reproductions of the exhibit drawings. Because of the use of shape and color, unique to this project at the time, you can understand the content without reading the notes, but the notes are also helpful.
Brilliant. Take a look.
October 17, 2025
The treatment in the book is two fold. In one respect, the life of William E.B. Du Bois is succinctly and respectfully profiled. In another, the analysis focuses on the breathtaking and premonitory aesthetic quality of his data visualization. There is a prescience to Du Bois’ designs whether intentional or relational in retrospect. The bold and idiosyncratically artistic graphic styles utilize elements of art movements that postdate these data visualizations such as Dutch De Stijl and Italian Futurism. The pieces are most impressive.
Their aesthetic quality put aside for a moment, the informative content is crucial to understanding the contradictions of Black society in the United States. Du Bois has a dual purpose: on one hand, he is trying to show the absurdity of Jim Crow era doctrine and the statutory realm they occupy showing the direct lines by which slavery has framed and more specifically continues to frame and hinder the present; on the other hand, his prime focus feels to be one of exemplifying the upward mobility of Black Americans and showcasing their social progression since reconstruction while demonstrating their excellence in relation to a long standing history of African excellence, extending to (and, contrary to the common misgivings, not excluding) their descendants in the diaspora.
The allegorical quality of the passage explaining how Du Bois’ diagrams were easier to ship to Paris than he was. . . How he could hardly afford a ticket and in the desperate last minutes secured passage in the steerage of a vessel. . . is arresting. The text goes on:
“The image of Du Bois traveling across the Atlantic in steerage—in close proximity to the hold of the ship—does not sit comfortably with our own image of Du Bois as a cultural elite and famous intellectual, nor does it reflect the same vision of racial progress and modernity represented in the infographics themselves”.
It is difficult to find a more poignant point in the text not for lack of astute vision and genius on part of Du Bois but rather in a matter of fact sense acknowledging the grand weight and institutional palpability of racism in America and its reciprocal ever-so-seemingly triumphant handicap on Black Americans.
Du Bois and Booker T Washington can, if I can word it loosely, lose me politically with their willingness to appeal to White moderates; although, the allusions to King and his attention to this purportedly important task some 60 years later cannot be understated nor can the failures to look at the situation from a sociological lens be wantonly accepted should analysis of these literary and social giants rest there.
Their aesthetic quality put aside for a moment, the informative content is crucial to understanding the contradictions of Black society in the United States. Du Bois has a dual purpose: on one hand, he is trying to show the absurdity of Jim Crow era doctrine and the statutory realm they occupy showing the direct lines by which slavery has framed and more specifically continues to frame and hinder the present; on the other hand, his prime focus feels to be one of exemplifying the upward mobility of Black Americans and showcasing their social progression since reconstruction while demonstrating their excellence in relation to a long standing history of African excellence, extending to (and, contrary to the common misgivings, not excluding) their descendants in the diaspora.
The allegorical quality of the passage explaining how Du Bois’ diagrams were easier to ship to Paris than he was. . . How he could hardly afford a ticket and in the desperate last minutes secured passage in the steerage of a vessel. . . is arresting. The text goes on:
“The image of Du Bois traveling across the Atlantic in steerage—in close proximity to the hold of the ship—does not sit comfortably with our own image of Du Bois as a cultural elite and famous intellectual, nor does it reflect the same vision of racial progress and modernity represented in the infographics themselves”.
It is difficult to find a more poignant point in the text not for lack of astute vision and genius on part of Du Bois but rather in a matter of fact sense acknowledging the grand weight and institutional palpability of racism in America and its reciprocal ever-so-seemingly triumphant handicap on Black Americans.
Du Bois and Booker T Washington can, if I can word it loosely, lose me politically with their willingness to appeal to White moderates; although, the allusions to King and his attention to this purportedly important task some 60 years later cannot be understated nor can the failures to look at the situation from a sociological lens be wantonly accepted should analysis of these literary and social giants rest there.
March 3, 2025
Summary: Short look at both the history of WEB Dubois 1900 World Fair project and how it predated much of the graphical data representation that became common later in the 20th century.
This is not a long book. There are really only a handful of essays. Those essays give context to the 1900 Paris World Exposition, WEB DuBois and his experience up until this point, and the data that was being presented. A final section discusses how innovative the presentation of the data was and how it predated later similar graphical data presentations.
I have known about this book since it came out but just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I have an undergrad degree in sociology and part of an early job was using GIS demographics to help churches and church plants with planning. So I have a fair amount of background to know how important this event was in regard to data presentation.
But this matters in part because of what WEB DuBois and the others who participated were trying to do. 1900 was 35 years after the end of slavery. Contextually, 35 yeas ago was 1990, and the first Iraq War hadn’t happened yet. George HW Bush was president and the http protocol was being developed but the first real web browser would not be released widely until 1994. In other words, slavery was recent. It wasn’t just that slavery was recent but that there was widespread perception that Black Americans (and all from African decent) were “less than” those from European decent. The presentation, and WEB DuBois himself, were proof of the falsity of that belief.
This is a fairly niche book, but in a time where there less celebration of minority accomplishments, this is just another datapoint that needs to be widely known. If you want to see some of the graphics from the presentation, the Museum of African American History and Culture has a good webpage about it.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/visualizing-black-a...
This is not a long book. There are really only a handful of essays. Those essays give context to the 1900 Paris World Exposition, WEB DuBois and his experience up until this point, and the data that was being presented. A final section discusses how innovative the presentation of the data was and how it predated later similar graphical data presentations.
I have known about this book since it came out but just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I have an undergrad degree in sociology and part of an early job was using GIS demographics to help churches and church plants with planning. So I have a fair amount of background to know how important this event was in regard to data presentation.
But this matters in part because of what WEB DuBois and the others who participated were trying to do. 1900 was 35 years after the end of slavery. Contextually, 35 yeas ago was 1990, and the first Iraq War hadn’t happened yet. George HW Bush was president and the http protocol was being developed but the first real web browser would not be released widely until 1994. In other words, slavery was recent. It wasn’t just that slavery was recent but that there was widespread perception that Black Americans (and all from African decent) were “less than” those from European decent. The presentation, and WEB DuBois himself, were proof of the falsity of that belief.
This is a fairly niche book, but in a time where there less celebration of minority accomplishments, this is just another datapoint that needs to be widely known. If you want to see some of the graphics from the presentation, the Museum of African American History and Culture has a good webpage about it.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/visualizing-black-a...
July 25, 2024
A year or two ago I saw an exhibit with most (all?) of these graphics at the Cooper Hewitt, so it was really nice to sit down with this book and really take my time looking at the graphs, charts, and other data visualizations. First, I enjoyed learning more about W.E.B. Du Bois and this project that he was a part of. As probably one of the first Black American sociologists, he was analyzing actual data at a time when sociology was still largely theoretical. The graphics are visually compelling and tell an interesting story of post-emancipation life for African Americans in Georgia and the United States until the late 1890s. I didn't realize his aim was to demonstrate to the world, at this Paris exhibition, how Black people had managed to advance so far in just a third of a century since the Civil War with little, if any, support from the federal government and in the face of violence, proscriptive laws, etc. The biggest issue I have, which bothered me a lot when I first saw these graphics at the museum, is that many of them are just bad examples of data visualization. To be fair, few people were doing this at the time--it was kind of a new form of scientific art--but really the only way data should ever be visualized is if the human brain can easily compute what's being displayed. That means no pie charts, no spirals, no random colors, no pyramids, no unlabeled data, no shapes that aren't proportional in size. Really only bar charts and line graphs are acceptable, as boring as that might be. Graphics always have to have source notes and numbers or other labels to give it full context. Most of these graphics lacked them. But anyway, this book and the project are both great and interesting. I think that what Du Bois and his colleagues and students were doing at the time was incredibly innovative and important, and we needed them to pioneer sociological data visualization so people could further fine tune it down the line.
March 18, 2019
Despite concentrating in Sociology as an undergraduate (at Princeton University no less, what's ostensibly the *best* Sociology program in the U.S.), I only ever encountered DuBois's work in my African American and American Studies courses. It was in those courses that I first read 'Souls' and 'Black Reconstruction,' in those courses that learned about Du Bois's preeminence as a sociologist, historian, and fiction writer. DuBois was entirely absent from my home department's undergraduate core course, "Sociological Theory," an omission that I deeply hope has since been rectified.
Prior to the turn of the 20th century, history, sociology, political science, and economics were not distinct disciplines; scholars were writing across and between these divisions as we now know them. In the U.S. in particular, sociology's emergence as a distinct discipline is often tied to the work of scholars at the University of Chicago. 'W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America' upends the notion that American sociology "begins" with the Chicago School. Du Bois, his Atlanta University students (which included a significant number of Black women), colleagues, and others performed groundbreaking sociological work in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that has truly come to shape the field as we know it. In the data portraits shown here, those exclusively made for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, we see how Du Bois pursued sociological inquiry that relied upon rigorous data collection and statistical analysis long before quantitative methods became essential to the discipline. In this way, American sociologists owe the students and scholars of the Atlanta School a debt; they set the standard for quantitative and mixed-methods research. However, I don't mean to suggest that, like many contemporary quant researchers, Du Bois and his team devalued qualitative and historical research and methods. The opposite is true. All data that the team showed in this exhibit were contextualized; without historical grounding and analysis, Du Bois and his team knew that the data lacked significance.
Beyond this, the data visualizations warrant discussion based on their artistic merit alone. Each plate is a work of art: abstract forms, bold colors, geometric shapes, and negative space. The sociologists of the Atlanta School were scholars, empiricists, and artists all in one. And the *type* of data they collected tells a really complicated narrative about race and racialization, about slavery and its afterlives, about white supremacy and racial domination, and about humanity and dignity. The students and scholars of the Atlanta School deserve inclusion in wider narratives about American Sociology's origins and methods. They've also left 21st Century sociologists and data scientists with powerful images of the type of visceral, ethical, and creative work a sociological imagination can produce. I hope we follow their example.
Prior to the turn of the 20th century, history, sociology, political science, and economics were not distinct disciplines; scholars were writing across and between these divisions as we now know them. In the U.S. in particular, sociology's emergence as a distinct discipline is often tied to the work of scholars at the University of Chicago. 'W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America' upends the notion that American sociology "begins" with the Chicago School. Du Bois, his Atlanta University students (which included a significant number of Black women), colleagues, and others performed groundbreaking sociological work in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that has truly come to shape the field as we know it. In the data portraits shown here, those exclusively made for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, we see how Du Bois pursued sociological inquiry that relied upon rigorous data collection and statistical analysis long before quantitative methods became essential to the discipline. In this way, American sociologists owe the students and scholars of the Atlanta School a debt; they set the standard for quantitative and mixed-methods research. However, I don't mean to suggest that, like many contemporary quant researchers, Du Bois and his team devalued qualitative and historical research and methods. The opposite is true. All data that the team showed in this exhibit were contextualized; without historical grounding and analysis, Du Bois and his team knew that the data lacked significance.
Beyond this, the data visualizations warrant discussion based on their artistic merit alone. Each plate is a work of art: abstract forms, bold colors, geometric shapes, and negative space. The sociologists of the Atlanta School were scholars, empiricists, and artists all in one. And the *type* of data they collected tells a really complicated narrative about race and racialization, about slavery and its afterlives, about white supremacy and racial domination, and about humanity and dignity. The students and scholars of the Atlanta School deserve inclusion in wider narratives about American Sociology's origins and methods. They've also left 21st Century sociologists and data scientists with powerful images of the type of visceral, ethical, and creative work a sociological imagination can produce. I hope we follow their example.
February 27, 2025
My friend lent me this book after I covered a class reading on Du Bois' "The Philadelphia Negro". (Strangely, this Feb has been a convergence of related themes - I'm currently studying in Philly, my friend picked up the book from the Philly Art Museum's The Time Is Always Now exhibition on Black artists, my class reading was on Du Bois' work in the city, and February celebrates Black History Month.) But I digress.
Du Bois has been synonymous with pushing for empirical, data-driven analysis of social conditions. The colored graphs and charts presented in the book highlighted the lived realities of Black communities, focusing on how economic, social, and racial factors intersected to create and perpetuate systemic inequalities. In an age where Jim Crow laws existed, I can imagine the discomfort that (mostly white, upper-class) readers felt during the Paris Exposition when confronted with the struggles of Black communities. The visuals are artistic and sobering all at once, as the statistics also made me think about what's different about the lived realities of Black communities decades later. Also, its interesting to see these reproductions in the age of data visualization - the designs are way ahead of its time!
TLDR: powerful, striking visuals that provide visibility to the realities of Black communities, a good read for anyone interested in social statistics, social justice, art, design, history, data visualization.
Du Bois has been synonymous with pushing for empirical, data-driven analysis of social conditions. The colored graphs and charts presented in the book highlighted the lived realities of Black communities, focusing on how economic, social, and racial factors intersected to create and perpetuate systemic inequalities. In an age where Jim Crow laws existed, I can imagine the discomfort that (mostly white, upper-class) readers felt during the Paris Exposition when confronted with the struggles of Black communities. The visuals are artistic and sobering all at once, as the statistics also made me think about what's different about the lived realities of Black communities decades later. Also, its interesting to see these reproductions in the age of data visualization - the designs are way ahead of its time!
TLDR: powerful, striking visuals that provide visibility to the realities of Black communities, a good read for anyone interested in social statistics, social justice, art, design, history, data visualization.
August 22, 2020
Collecting the charts and graphs from 1900 Paris world exposition produced by sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and collaborators at Atlanta University along with a series of contextualizing essays and comments, this tract presents a classic of both quantitative social science and of graphic design. The gorgeous gouache, ink, and pencil based charts and maps document African American life and society in the post-Civil War era, and, quietly, tell a story of the changes and challenges faced during reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. The level of granular detail is impressive for work a century ago, reflecting a large team collecting data, performing calculations, and creating and interpreting visual displays manually through printing and custom typesetting, to create charts like one documenting income and expenditure by detailed category for a sample of 150 families.
This is recommended to anyone today who works with data visualization, which isn't surprising since I learned of it from Kieran Healy's "Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction," for which Du Bois' graphs were a major inspiration. I would love to see some enterprising programmers provide digitized versions of the data presented, and if someone were to create a gouache and ink on parchment theme for ggplot, pyplot, or similar programs, I expect it would see a lot of use.
This is recommended to anyone today who works with data visualization, which isn't surprising since I learned of it from Kieran Healy's "Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction," for which Du Bois' graphs were a major inspiration. I would love to see some enterprising programmers provide digitized versions of the data presented, and if someone were to create a gouache and ink on parchment theme for ggplot, pyplot, or similar programs, I expect it would see a lot of use.
November 17, 2022
W.E.B. Du Bois and his students conducted groundbreaking studies on Black Americans in collaborations with other sociologists at historically Black colleges and Universities. The results were important in showing the progress of Black Americans since emancipation and were featured at the International Paris Exposition in 1900 and later in the US. The results were portrayed in what were at the time innovative graphs, using color and font to make their point. Since this foundational work both in topic and in presentation, the way we portray data and make it intuitively accessible in graphs and images is a topic that still garners much attention in scientific research. There are a couple of essays at the beginning, which are followed by about 60 color plates. You should definitely read this as a hard copy, not an e-book (not even sure if that it's out in that format). While most of the plates are easy to read, some are faint.
February 25, 2023
I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy of this at the Strand bookstore in NYC, and boy is it great. It combines two of my current areas of interest (post-abolition American history and data visualization) in a way that I can only describe as inspiring. The methods that W. E. B. DuBois and his team show here, both in visualization and in social research, are at least half a century ahead of their time. I wish there were a little more here in terms of commentary and analysis of DuBois’ diagrams, but certainly there’s something to be said for letting that work speak for itself (and it has plenty to say). This has inspired me to read more work both by and about DuBois. Glad I found it. Recommended to anybody interested in the history and historiography of Black Americans, as well as anybody interested in data visualization.
March 24, 2019
I knew about this series. Or at least I thought I knew about this series. In reproducing the inforgraphics and presenting them afresh with contextualising essays, these sets of work take their rightful place as visual, aesthetic and informational trailblazing offerings. To think that Du Bois and co would do this--with students and others leading the way--is incredibly motivating.
I present information in multiple forms and looking across the sets has made me revisit how I tell a story and the type of activism that my information might engage in--beyond the data.
I'm hoping that artists, graphic designers, students and others will pick up this text and see a ready need to engage in similar acts of transgression and innovation, today.
I present information in multiple forms and looking across the sets has made me revisit how I tell a story and the type of activism that my information might engage in--beyond the data.
I'm hoping that artists, graphic designers, students and others will pick up this text and see a ready need to engage in similar acts of transgression and innovation, today.
September 3, 2020
W. E. B Du Bois had a spot at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 and the chance to upend the racist assumptions people. As a sociologist of Black America he a lot of data to present and needed to do it in a way that grabbed attention. What his team came up with was something truly different.
Bar charts had already been introduced but Du Bois used them in ways I had never seen before. The bars twist double back and even spiral. It’s so easy to make a bar chart theses days that we hardly think about it. In 1900, these had to be carefully drawn and coloured by hand. The final result is just stunning.
After the exhibition Du Bois did try to have the collection returned. It seems like he never got it back. The papers did end up in the Library of Congress and were thankfully digitized and preserved.
This is interesting snapshot of American history and the incredible work of W.E.B. Du Bois.
Bar charts had already been introduced but Du Bois used them in ways I had never seen before. The bars twist double back and even spiral. It’s so easy to make a bar chart theses days that we hardly think about it. In 1900, these had to be carefully drawn and coloured by hand. The final result is just stunning.
After the exhibition Du Bois did try to have the collection returned. It seems like he never got it back. The papers did end up in the Library of Congress and were thankfully digitized and preserved.
This is interesting snapshot of American history and the incredible work of W.E.B. Du Bois.
February 10, 2021
Surprised, in a good way, by how much I enjoyed a book about graphs!
The introductory essays helped me learn a little more about some of the extraordinary work and life of W.E.B. Du Bois.
The commentary on the visualizations created for the 1900 Paris Exhibition is very good. It's slanted towards demonstrating how Du Bois's contributions to design and sociology have been underappreciated. Ironically, that is very similar to the story the graphs tell.
In 1900, people of the world had a lot of misunderstandings about Black people. In 2021, the same. Amazingly timely book given the focus on systemic racism today.
So many great insights both for storytelling in design and about diversity and inclusion.
The introductory essays helped me learn a little more about some of the extraordinary work and life of W.E.B. Du Bois.
The commentary on the visualizations created for the 1900 Paris Exhibition is very good. It's slanted towards demonstrating how Du Bois's contributions to design and sociology have been underappreciated. Ironically, that is very similar to the story the graphs tell.
In 1900, people of the world had a lot of misunderstandings about Black people. In 2021, the same. Amazingly timely book given the focus on systemic racism today.
So many great insights both for storytelling in design and about diversity and inclusion.
August 24, 2021
Truly a work of art. The plates in this book are gorgeous to look it and pack quite the punch. The genius and creativity of Du Bois and his team to take a lot of complicated data and make it simple, elegant, and beautiful. I wish I was taught this stuff in school - there is valuable information about history, sociology, infographics, data visualization, education...
The careful work put into each and every plate is evident. You can still see how people carefully colored in bar graphs and maps, the handwriting from people long gone is still legible, and there was clearly a lot of thought put into how each graph would look. They make this look easy work when I know and other people how much time and effort each plate took to draft, create, and finalize.
The careful work put into each and every plate is evident. You can still see how people carefully colored in bar graphs and maps, the handwriting from people long gone is still legible, and there was clearly a lot of thought put into how each graph would look. They make this look easy work when I know and other people how much time and effort each plate took to draft, create, and finalize.
January 13, 2024
Such cool data visualizations. The book is mostly visualizations with small accompanying explainer notes (which I thought could have been longer) and some introductory essays. Du Bois and his team used very innovative and what must have been cutting edge design choices to communicate complex datasets about black Americans at the turn of the last century to foreign audiences in Paris for some event in 1900 (World's Fair?). I especially loved their technique for visualizing bar charts where one bar was much larger than others, a winding snake-like bar or also spirals. I wish you could make those more easily with current visualizations tools. I wonder if these visualizations are used to train designers? I feel like they should be.
October 29, 2024
I first came across some of Du Bois's avant garde infographics in the superb Afrofuturist exhibit at the Smithsonian. This books presents all of the pieces printed for the 1900 Paris exhibition in order, and they are magnificent. As the introductory material** rightly points out, they precede Constructivism, Bauhaus, and Edward Tufte by decades. Moving, informative, beautiful, and effective, this marriage of art and science is unmissable.
** The 3 introductions cover much of the same ground, and while they are all competent and informative, they are NOT necessary to appreciating the data portraits in their own right. Feel free (encouraged even) to jump right into the Du Bois materials without context. Much of their effectiveness lies in immediately grounding and orienting the viewer.
** The 3 introductions cover much of the same ground, and while they are all competent and informative, they are NOT necessary to appreciating the data portraits in their own right. Feel free (encouraged even) to jump right into the Du Bois materials without context. Much of their effectiveness lies in immediately grounding and orienting the viewer.
August 13, 2020
What an amazing book. I would give it 10 stars if I could. This book reproduces in beautiful, delicate tones the exhibit created by W.E.B. duBois and colleagues from Atlanta University for the Exposition des Negres d'Amerique in Paris in 1900. It is a series of visual documents and works of art (calling them graphs does not do justice to their genius) describing the life experience of Blacks in the United States. If you are a fan of Edward Tufte, or early modern art and typography, or have any interest in the history of the Black experience in the U.S.A. after slavery, get this book.
Read
April 2, 2021The text was fast to read--only about 50 pages. The images of Du Bois's information graphics could take me weeks or months to study, and I will spend more time with them. I am really glad I didn't get this as a Kindle book (I think I said that already). It's inexpensive in Kindle format, but the extra cost was worth it to have the larger format and the colors. Originally, they were drawn on large boards for an exhibit. As a consequence, some were difficult to read, but the patterns were evident. And disturbing.
August 17, 2024
Around the turn of the century, 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois and a team mostly from Atlanta University compiled over 60 charts, graphs, and tables displaying data on the Black American population and its changing circumstances since the abolition of slavery. The collection was exhibited in Europe and America and is recorded in this book using digitized images.
These images are historically significant records for students of sociology, Black Studies, infographics, social justice, and W.E.B. himself.
These images are historically significant records for students of sociology, Black Studies, infographics, social justice, and W.E.B. himself.
November 19, 2019
Whoa! Over 100 years ago, Du Bois created these amazing "data portraits" -- like infographics -- to paint a picture of black life in America. He took them to the Paris Expo in 1900 to display. Here they all are -- both chock full of information about black Americans in the late 1800s (as Jim Crow is truly taking root, and before the Great Migration) and works of art. Totally cool. Want to teach from these.
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