Dubois Challenge
The data this week comes from Anthony Starks, Allen Hillery Sekou Tyler. Note that Anthony Starks has provided many examples and data preparation, including a “style guide” and article.
All credit goes to Anthony, Allen, and Sekou for the preparation of this week’s datasets/challenge.
Anthony, Allen, and Sekou have put together a very cool data challenge as part of a longer celebration of “the data visualization legacy of W.E.B DuBois by recreating the visualizations from the 1900 Paris Exposition using modern tools.” A quick guide to the “Dubosian style” by Anthony Starks.
Their original readme and source of data can be found on their GitHub. Please check it out for even more detail, but I have duplicated the core details below:
I have included a repeat of TidyTuesday census data from week 23 of 2020, which covers the US census data broken down by race from, 1790 to 1990, where the 13th Amendment “officially abolished” slavery in 1865.
Please use the #DuBoisChallenge hashtag to fully interact/overlap with their event and note that it will continue for several weeks!
The goal of the challenge is to celebrate the data visualization legacy of W.E.B DuBois by recreating the visualizations from the 1900 Paris Exposition using modern tools.
This directory contains the data and original plates from the exposition; your goal is to re-create the visualizations using modern tools of your choice (Tableau, PowerBi, decksh, etc)
In this repo, there is a folder for each challenge, which includes the images of the 1900 original plates along with the corresponding data. You may submit your re-creations to twitter using the hash tag
#DuBoisChallenge
The Challenges
- challenge01: Comparative Increase of White and Colored Population in Georgia
- challenge02: Conjugal Condition
- challenge03: Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgia
- challenge04: Proportion of Freeman and Slaves Among American Negroes
- challenge05: Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta, GA, USA
- challenge06: City and Rural Population 1890
- challenge07: Assessed Value of Household and Kitchen Furniture Owned by Georgia Negroes.
- challenge08: The Georgia Negro. A Social Study by W.E.Burghardt Du Bois
- challenge09: Migration of Negroes
- challenge10: Negro Population of Georgia by Counties
Anthony’s article on Recreating W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits.
In May 2017, I attended a talk: “Historical development of W.E.B. Du Bois’s graphical narrative” at the Data Visualization New York meetup. As an African-American, I was intrigued by the subject matter and fascinated by the visualization choices — especially, the now-iconic spiral charts. I made a mental note to attempt to recreate these.
Who is W.E.B. Du Bois?
Overall, W.E.B. Du Bois was a true data visualization expert and visionary who sought with data and data visualization to challenge the incorrect thinking and racist views prevalent in the early 20th century, all only a few decades after the freeing of American slaves.
For folks who are not familiar with the works of Du Bois, please read through the articles below:
Data Journalism in the study of W.E.B. Du Bois
One of the most powerful examples of data visualization was made 118 years ago by an all-black team led by W.E.B. Du Bois only 37 years after the end of slavery in the United States. “The Exhibit of American Negroes” was a sociological display at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and was a collaboration by noted African-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, educator and social leader Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Calloway and students from historically black college Atlanta University.
WEB Du Bois: retracing his attempt to challenge racism with data
Any African American to be admitted to Harvard University in 1888 had to be exceptionally gifted. But that description doesn’t come close to capturing the talent of WEB Du Bois, a man who managed to write 21 books, as well as over 100 essays while being a professor and a relentless civil rights activist.
Du Bois saw no trade-off between those pursuits – his scholarship was protest and his protest was scholarship. He deeply understood something that every activist scrawling a banner in Washington knows today – messaging matters.
At the 1900 World Exposition in Paris, Du Bois went armed with beautiful photographs that showed African Americans posing with dignity. But he also knew that the photographs, however elegant, would fail to persuade many. So, he also took data “to show: (a) The history of the American Negro. (b) His present condition. (c) His education. (d) His literature.”
With the help of students at the Atlanta University where he was a professor of economics and history, Du Bois created dozens of illustrations that put many of today’s data visualization experts to shame. The work was the inspiration for Theaster Gates’ latest exhibition in Los Angeles which started this month, and for Black History Month, I wanted to update four of Du Bois’ visualizations with the most recent data available.
W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color
After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country. The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant. In 1897, the United States Supreme Court would rule in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate was indeed equal. All the while, new generations of African-Americans found ways to uplift themselves, despite discrimination, through grassroots efforts in education, work and community building.
After graduating with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent African-American intellectual, sought a way to process all this information showing why the African disapora in America was being held back in a tangible, contextualized form. “It is not one problem,” as Du Bois wrote in 1898, “but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex; and these problems have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves above those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land.”
To accomplish this goal, Du Bois turned to the burgeoning field of sociology. Sociology’s scope in history, statistics, and demographics held the potential to quantifiably reveal “life within the Veil,” as Du Bois called the structural forces of oppressions that separated black and white populations, whether that came to educational attainment, voting rights or land ownership.
Get the data here
# Get the Data
# Read in with tidytuesdayR package
# Install from CRAN via: install.packages("tidytuesdayR")
# This loads the readme and all the datasets for the week of interest
# Either ISO-8601 date or year/week works!
tuesdata <- tidytuesdayR::tt_load('2021-02-16')
tuesdata <- tidytuesdayR::tt_load(2021, week = 8)
georgia_pop <- tuesdata$georgia_pop
# Or read in the data manually
georgia_pop <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/georgia_pop.csv')
census <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/census.csv')
furniture <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/furniture.csv')
city_rural <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/city_rural.csv')
income <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/income.csv')
freed_slaves <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/freed_slaves.csv')
occupation <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/occupation.csv')
conjugal <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-02-16/conjugal.csv')Data Dictionary
Please note that I am leaving the data as it was found/presented in 1900, and specifically the use of the offensive term “colored” for Black/African-American.
georgia_pop.csv
Population change by race in Georgia.
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Year | double | Year |
| Colored | double | Black population in Georgia |
| White | double | White population in Georgia |
conjugal.csv
Marriage status, original image
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Population | character | Population Group |
| Age | character | Age group |
| Single | double | Percent single |
| Married | double | Percent Married |
| Divorced and Widowed | double | Percent Divorced or Widowed |
occupation.csv
Occupation by race, original image
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Group | character | Racial Group |
| Occupation | character | Occupation |
| Percentage | double | Percentage |
freed_slaves.csv
Proportion of freemen vs slaves in US by year, original image
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Year | double | Year |
| Slave | double | Proportion enslaved |
| Free | double | Proportion freed |
Note that the census.csv all provides similar data for longer range.
census.csv
Not an official Du Bois dataset (as it goes farther than 1900), but includes more detail, comes from TidyTuesday 2020-week 23.
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| region | character | US Region |
| division | character | US Division |
| year | double | Year of Census |
| total | double | Total population |
| white | double | White population |
| black | double | Black population |
| black_free | double | Black and free population |
| black_slaves | double | Black and enslaved population |
income.csv
Income brackets and annual expenditures, original image
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Class | character | Income class |
| Actual Average | double | Actual average income |
| Rent | double | Rent |
| Food | double | Food |
| Clothes | double | Clothes |
| Tax | double | Tax |
| Other | double | Other |
city_rural.csv
Black population split between city and rural areas, original image
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Category | character | Category of city |
| Population | double | Population by category |
furniture.csv
Assessed value of household and kitchen furniture owned by Black American in Georgia, original image
| variable | class | description |
|---|---|---|
| Year | double | Year |
| Houshold Value (Dollars) | double | Furniture value |
Cleaning Script
No cleaning script this week, but massive credit to Anthony Stark for his efforts in aggregating, cleaning, and putting it all on GitHub. See his process in his article on Recreating W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits.