The W.E.B. Du Bois Visualization Challenge

W.E.B. Du Bois led a team that created a revolutionary exhibit for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900. Du Bois believed that the world was thinking wrong about race. His proposed cure—knowledge and scientific investigation. The Du Bois team from Atlanta University created over 60 statistical graphics about the African-American population. I explored six facets of his visionary visualization work:

• W.E.B. Du Bois and The Spiral Chart

• W.E.B. Du Bois and Subtle Groupings and Poetic Annotations

• W.E.B. Du Bois and The Dueling Fan Chart

• W.E.B. Du Bois and Negative Space

• W.E.B. Du Bois and The Pinwheel Chart

This year, we created a revolutionary open-source engine for low-code analytics apps called Mods. It makes it easy to modify Spotfire with unique visualizations and combine them into no-code analytics apps. Here’s last week’s example, the Stop Times Mod, used to create a mass transit analytics control application.

Let’s bring W.E.B. Du Bois’ data science work into the 21st century! I'll send a mounted print on museum-quality paper of Du Bois’ if you contribute a Du Bois Mod with the community.

Happy Modding!

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The Du Bois Spiral. Read about it here.

Acknowledgments, and For More Exploration

As the old saying goes, I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out. For Du Bois and data science, I read this article by Jason Forrest and went down the rabbit hole. If you’re inspired, here are my four favorite places to start:

1. On Being: W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul. W.E.B. Du Bois is best known as a poet, activist, writer, and social scientist. This discussion features Krista Tippett, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad. It's a great place to start.

2. The Jason Forrest series on W.E.B. Du Bois on Medium. This started it all for me. There’s so much more here to enjoy.

3. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America--by Whitney Battle-Baptiste & Britt Rusert is a beautiful book about his visualizations. Get the old-fashioned hardcover print version!

4. The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois’ seminal work. On NPR, X. Kendi said of this book, “A central metaphor in the book is the idea that a veil separates white and black America. Blacks can see through the veil, whites either can't or won't.”

And, of course, feel free to return to the first post in my series.

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