UPDATED: A Digression for Black History Month: W.E.B. DuBois and 21st Century Data Visualization for the 1900 Paris Exposition

UPDATE: This was a great week to think about data visualization and W.E.B. Du Bois in particular. Tableau held its user group with two excellent presentations on the Du Bois visualizations. The first was by Jason Forrest, who wrote the series in Nightingale Magazine (linked below), and the second was by Anthony Starks, who shows how to duplicate the presentations in Decksh. (Full disclosure: Dr. Starks's talk was a bit over my head, but if you are into programming it's a great thing to see.) You can watch it here.

There were two things that I learned by watching these presentations, and the interactions that I had with my colleagues about them.

The first was another bit of evidence of the power of language, and how much language changes over time. Dr. Forrest mentioned at the beginning of his talk that the term Du Bois uses in reference to Black people is jarring for many of us in the year 2021, and my colleagues and I talked about this after we watched it. As he noted, it's important for us to honor Du Bois's language, at the same time that we recognize how language evolves.

The second was a reminder of how much progress library science has made in the last few years, and how much remains to follow. I asked Dr. Forrest why we haven't seen these visualizations before, and he responded that they were not digitized until 2013--only eight short years ago. With so many items only existing in hard copy, librarians and curators often lack full knowledge of what is in their collections. That said, it's worth noting that there was an enormous element of systemic racism at play. The exhibit was extensively published and discussed in the Black American press, but ignored everywhere else. But now the Du Bois visualizations are widely available online, and in the beautiful book below. Murray Dick also mentions the work in a footnote of his 2020 book The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications.

W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing
Black America is a gem of a book.

My "day job" is as an analytics lead for the National Library of Medicine, one of the institutes that make up the National Institutes of Health. Over the last twenty years or so, a major part of my career has focused on using charts and graphs to make a point for an audience, or to help them make a decision. (When I began my career, this was called "charts and graphs". Now it often goes by "data visualization", and the tools we use have become much more complex.

Florence Nightingale's diagram
of Crimean War deaths.
(National Library of Medicine)

Back when I started making charts and graphs -- er, doing data visualization -- one of my managers recommended the work of Edward Tufte, who is still seen as a leading figure in what he calls the "visual display of quantitative information." Tufte's focus is on visual elegance and simplicity, and he draws significantly from the work of William Playfair and Florence Nightingale,
who pioneered the use of data in chart form to help guide decisions in economics and public health, respectively. (Nightingale's work was particularly helpful in showing the importance of treating soldiers' wounds in the field, as she showed during the Crimean War that most deaths in the war were from infection and illness, not from wounds in action.)

Data visualization, like data science, is en vogue these days. Tufte just came out with a new book, his fifth, and every day I seem to receive another invitation to a Webinar or meeting about it. Tableau Public is a source of examples and best practices for every form of data under the sun,  Even Major League Baseball has gotten into the act with its own site, Baseball Savant. that includes something like a Tableau Public for baseball.

This past week, I learned about a data visualization practitioner whom I knew nothing about (at least in this field). W.E.B. Du Bois was a sociologist, novelist, essayist, and the first Black recipient of a Ph.D. from Harvard University. His literary and academic accomplishments are expansive--too much for this small space, but suffice to say that he is a giant. I've been aware of his work and his stature in the history of Black history and scholarship for many years. But I'll confess to some embarrassment that before now, I knew nothing about the incredible set of data visualizations that he and his team produced for the 1900 Paris Exposition about the state of Black America. Decades before Tableau, Excel, or similar tools made creating and printing complex charts and graphs easy, DuBois and his team made dozens of charts with straight edges and drafting tools. The expense was so high that Du Bois himself had to book steerage on a ship to travel to Europe for the exposition.

"City and Rural Population, 1890,"
from W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits:
Visualizing Black America,
Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.
Note how the red portion of the diagram,
showing rural population, is tightly spiraled,
which illustrates how few Black Americans lived
in large (green) or small (yellow) cities.

The data itself is compelling, and anticipates how America today is grappling with economic inequality and systemic racism: population data, income growth, farm and property ownership,education, and marriage. The visualizations though, are exquisite. (I recommend this book from Princeton Architectural Press that contains all of them in full color, along with several essays that put the collection in context.) They find inventive ways of showing, for example, the difference between the large rural Black population and the small percentage in urban areas. 

The colors are bold and the presentations simple and stark. Some have remarked that they hearken to Russian conceptual art and the Bauhaus school of design, but those movements didn't even come about until fifteen and twenty years later, so it's likely safer to assume that these images may have inspired them. In any case, given his own training in sociology, it's likely that Du Bois drew on Playfair and Nightingale, which he had probably encountered during his sociology research and study, in developing his own work.

As my other posts on this blog show, I don't just think about my card paintings themselves, but I also care a great deal about design, and what design says about the world around us. I also think that showcasing voices that are new--even if only new to us--is essential as we try to expand our own thinking. I wish that it hadn't taken me so long to learn about Du Bois's amazing data visualization work. But late is better than never, and I'm delighted to share it at a time when we so need to understand each other and build America to be better than it has been before.