As the saying goes, a picture plus a thousand words is better than two pictures or two thousand words. Here we consider two ways that words and pictures are combined on the page: statistical graphics (also called data graphics or information visualization) and comics (also called sequential art or bande dessinée). These forms of visual representation typically have different purposes—to inform or to entertain—and show up in different contexts, ranging from government reports to the comic books that formed the basis of Hollywood blockbusters.

In our work in statistics and social science, we have used data graphics for several decades in applied research and have also contributed to theory and methods linking graphical communication to statistical modeling. When it comes to cartoons, we are merely readers and fans, not creators. In learning about their history, we were struck by parallels to the history of data visualization (see Figure 1), and we also see some convergence between these two forms of narrative, now that information visualizations have become more prominent in advertisement and communication, and comics have come to be viewed not merely as a pop culture phenomenon but as a branch of literature.

Figures 1a and 1b. In one of the most famous political cartoons in history, James Gilray’s The Plumb-Pudding in Danger from 1805, William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte are portrayed slicing up the world (left). Florence Nightingale sliced up units of time in her compelling, although easily misinterpreted, 1858 statistical graph depicting the causes of avoidable deaths during the Crimean War (right).

Surprisingly recent histories

Cartoons and data graphics require nothing apart from ink and paper, yet only during the past two centuries did scientists and artists go beyond the basics to develop now-routine visual techniques for displaying data and stories on the page. The slow development of these media is interesting, especially considering that, unlike with cinema, for example, the basic technologies have always been accessible. Scientists, mathematicians, and accountants in earlier eras could have been understanding patterns in their data using scatterplots–but they weren’t. Artists and authors could have been combining words and drawings to vividly convey speech and action-–but they weren’t.

Time series and scatterplots seem ordinary to us, but as visual representations of information, they are highly abstract compared to such centuries-old schematic illustrations as geographical maps or anatomical drawings. Depictions of data have existed for thousands of years, whether pressed into Babylonian clay tablets or inked onto bamboo slips during China’s Qin dynasty, more than 200 years before paper was invented. Illustrations of data and mathematical concepts evolved over the centuries to exploit each historic advance in visual media—inks, papers, brushes, pens, printing, computers—as well as building on the diagramming innovations of other scientific disciplines. Michael Friendly and Daniel Denis trace the development of general-purpose data graphics in the 1700s and 1800s to earlier uses of quantitative displays in astronomy, where the positions of stars and planets in the sky can be directly mapped onto a two-dimensional space, as well as to depictions in mathematical physics.

Figures 2a and 2b. Engravings exploded in popularity in the 15th century, but were superseded by the newer technology of etchings in the 16th to 17th centuries. Jacques Callot was a master printmaker who invented techniques so that etchings looked cleaner, more elegant, and more precise , as seen in his depiction of Envy (left) in his Deadly Sins series from 1620. The intaglio printing of astronomer and mathematician Edmund Halley’s drawing of what may be the first bivariate plot from his 1686 book Philosophical Transactions (right; the vertical axis is barometric pressure and the horizontal axis is altitude) reflects the delicate and meticulous style of contemporaneous illustrations.

The connection between time series, scatterplots, and mathematical functions can be seen in graphs in which a curve is fit to go through data (see Figure 2b). It seems to have taken centuries for people to go beyond this to plot data that did not fall exactly on or close to a smooth curve; indeed, this happened at roughly the same time that Fourier and others generalized the mathematical concept of function to represent arbitrary mappings between spaces. In the later 1800s, innovators such as Charles Minard, William Playfair, and Francis Galton (Figure 3b) demonstrated the open-ended possibilities of revealing patterns in data through novel visual conceptions; since then, data graphics have been increasingly important in the natural and physical sciences. In the past twenty years or so, information visualizations have colonized popular communication as well, from New Yorker cartoons of worried executives staring at charts of declining stock prices, to time series of global warming and the flatten-the-curve graphs during the pandemic. Data graphics have followed a steady increase in abstraction of conceit and presentation, which has paradoxically allowed them to be accessible to a wider range of purposes and audiences.

Figures 3a and 3b. In Thomas Rowlandson’s 1808 cartoon The Corsican Spider in His Web (left), the geometric pattern vividly and accessibly conveys a political point. Francis Galton’s 1886 correlational diagram of the heights of parents and children (right) has a similar visual appeal but requires the reader to put in much more effort to understand the data and statistical relationship being shown. The increasing abstraction of statistical graphics allows more information to be conveyed; the subsequent establishment of graphical conventions has allowed readers to more quickly interpret the content of scatterplots and fitted distributions.

Humorous caricatures and satiric cultural commentary in simplified visual form have been found to have existed at least as far back as the ancient Romans. In the supposed Dark Ages, lively drawings that lampooned society lined the margins of illuminated manuscripts, while the first known bar graphs, drawn by Nicole Oresme in 1486, seemed to have gone largely unnoticed. Playfair reinvented them, along with conceiving the pie chart, a few hundred years later, at around the same time the concept of the cartoon was taking shape. Scholars trace modern cartoons and comics as an outgrowth of printmaking, with political humor drawn by Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray (see Figure 4a), and George Cruikshank inspired by the French Revolution and packed with visual analogy. According to French-American cartoon historian Maurice Horn, perhaps the first to formally study the art form, “It was the universal acceptance of prints that led to the phased transition from caricature to what would later be called ‘cartoons,’ a form no longer devoted simply to cataloging external human idiosyncrasies, but one with an enlarged field of vision encompassing the whole political, social and cultural scene—indeed, the human condition itself.” These became staples of periodicals for the general reader at the tail-end of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth. It took a while during the first hundred years for the medium to evolve beyond successions of static images to the more fluid visual storytelling associated with turn-of-the-20th-century newspaper comics and then the longer-form stories appearing in the comic books, manga, and bandes dessinées that flourished in the mid-1900s.

Figures 4a and 4b. James Gilray’s 1793 political cartoon The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance (left) was a bestselling print in its time, as the public developed a taste for this genre; hundreds of cartoons were created during the French Revolution. William Playfair, once a spy for the French government who helped storm the Bastille, eventually settled into more sanguine vocations. He is credited with inventing the bar chart, Oresme having been long forgotten. Many of the foundations of statistical graphs were laid with Playfair’s line graphs, pie charts, and time series plots. Above, we see his graph of England’s trade balance with Denmark and Norway (right; from 1786), its artistry and annotations echoing the style of Gilray and his contemporaries.

Many consider school principal Rodolphe Töpffer to be the originator of the comic strip, having drawn cartoon-stories told in chronological series for the amusement of his students as early as the 1820s, later to be published to much acclaim. This artform was codified into box-shaped panels by Georges Columb (see Figure 5c), better known as Christoph. Töpffer and Columb were the forefathers of bande dessinée and of comic strips in general, along with other French innovators such as Emmanuel Poiré, a.k.a. Caran D’Ache (see Figure 5b) and Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a.k.a. Nadar, as well as the German Wilhelm Busch and the American A. B. Frost. The realism and refinement that developed with those genres matured into the albums and graphic novels of today.

Figures 5a, 5b, and 5c. The Swiss-French polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert called his surprisingly modern-looking diagrams figuren, and seems to have been the first to create lines of best fit, as seen in this graph of temperatures at varying latitudes from 1779 (left). The elegance of his rendering heralds the whimsical clean lines of the pioneers of bandes dessinée, such as French satirist and illustrator Emmanuel Poiré, better known by his pseudonym Caran D’Ache. His Le Rêve de M. Emile Zola​​ (center) was published in Le Figaro in 1889. Georges Columb, known as the children’s magazine illustrator Christophe, packed rectangles with painstaking detail, creating multiple-panel stories and establishing the visual grammar of comic strips. This image from 1893 (right) was part of a recurring series called L’Idée fixe du savant Cosinus published in Le Petit Français illustré.

As with statistical graphics, we are struck by how recently some of these developments arose: just as the capacity for scatterplots was available long before they were regularly made, so there is no reason why Tintin-style storytelling with rapid transitions and speech balloons could not have been done hundreds of years earlier. 

Heinz Pagels tells the story of “a stranger, who, recognizing Picasso, asked him why he didn’t paint people ‘the way they really are.’ Picasso asked the man what he meant by ‘the way they really are,’ and the man pulled out of his wallet a snapshot of his wife and said, ‘That’s my wife.’ Picasso responded, ‘Isn’t she rather small and flat?’” The relevance to our discussion here is that scatterplots, time series, speech balloons, and other tropes of statistical graphics and comics are so familiar that readers can see through the abstractions, as it were, in the same way that the husband on the train saw the photo not as a flat artifact but as a representation of a three-dimensional person. The story dramatizes that the difference between a cubist collage and a photorealist painting is not so much the level of abstraction as the familiarity of its conventions, and indeed it can take a generation for abstractions to enter the mainstream sufficiently that they can be built upon by new creators.

Statistical graphics came to maturity as a result of the mathematical use of Cartesian coordinates to represent dimensions other than physical space (see Figure 6b), along with probability distribution for variation that allowed real-world data to be represented by non-deterministic models. The rise of sequential comics coincided with the advent of film as a popular and artistic medium. Graphs and cartoons exist for entirely separate purposes, and so there may be no direct parallel here except a recognition that in science, policy, or entertainment, developments in different media feed off each other. The effectiveness of film opened the door to dynamic forms of visual storytelling on the page and in animation. Technologies of reproduction affect the forms of popular art, from printmaking in the 1700s to mass-circulation magazines and newspapers in the 1800s and 1900s, to movies and television today. Similarly, advances in mathematics and computing have turned statistical graphics from craft work into a set of routine tools in science and communication.

Figures 6a and 6b. Winsor McCay experimented with the form of the full-page newspaper comic strip with Little Nemo in Slumberland from 1905 until 1927 (left; this example from 1905). With exquisite draftsmanship, he frequently subverted the constraints of the strip’s panels. Within the same historic time frame, our understanding of atomic numbers was usurped in Henry Moseley’s graph of High Frequency Spectra of the Elements from 1913 (right). This visualization made clear that increases in atomic mass correspond to a physical property, correctly supposed by Moseley to be the number of electrons. Its lines foretold three then-unknown elements and that electrons hold a mysterious property, later discovered to be spin.

But even as they historically evolve at what seems like a yawning parallel distance, we may notice reflections of method and design between data-oriented graphs and cartoons (and the related illustrations that preceded their inventions) depending on the era and trends in artistry, as may be observed in the comparisons in our appendix. This points not only to contemporaneous conventions, but to the similar constraints required to deliver such abstractions as mathematical concepts and humor. That which is more comfortably communicated in written or spoken form (sentences or equations) is conscripted into a visual format built from the media available at the time.

Outsiders entering the mainstream

Statistical graphics and cartoons both have the feeling of “outsider art,” with an uneasy relation to more accepted forms of data analysis or storytelling. This may perhaps be most apparent when considering the visual outputs of such outsiders to the mainstream as sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (see Figure 7A) and the Creole artist George Herriman (see Figure 7b), with his aslant artistry and humor that featured a genderfluid cat.

Figures 7a and 7b. W. E.B. Du Bois, who established the first American school of sociology at Atlanta University, created a series of boldly colorful and geometric graphs depicting a social study of Black life in the U.S., exhibited in 1900. The above example (left) depicts the “proportion of almshouse paupers in every 100,000” Black citizens. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (right), which ran from 1913 to 1944 (this example is from 1942), was groundbreaking not only in its audacious design and narrative, but also in that Herriman was a Creole artist of national importance, and that his character Krazy was unequivocally genderfluid.

The meat of a scientific analysis or policy report will typically involve some mathematical modeling, with graphics being used for exploration or communication. There is a general recognition that exploration is a crucial component of learning from data, and communication is necessary in all areas of science, technology, and decision making—but graphics have traditionally been seen as less of a science and, at best, a form of practical art. Only recently have exploratory data analysis and visualization been formalized as part of statistical workflow; this has come during a period in which statistics has combined with data science and machine learning into a field in which computing is as important as mathematics. Visualization has moved closer to the mainstream of science.

Meanwhile, the role of comics in popular and literary culture has changed several times since 1900, moving from disposable newspaper strips, to wildly popular entertainment for children in the form of comic-book and television animations, to become a form of genre literature and, more recently, source material for popular movies. Commercially this has been a series of ups and downs, but from a cultural perspective, comics have followed the paths of crime fiction and science fiction into literary respectability. As with these other genres, comics retains its own insular culture along with some outlaw mentality.

In their modern forms, comics and statistical graphics both lean on conventions, some of which have become so familiar that they feel nearly invisible. For example, we take it for granted in Western culture that a time series runs from left to right, that comics run from left to right and from top to bottom of the page (except when they don’t), that the horizontal axis on a scatterplot represents a predictor and the vertical axis represents the outcome, that the wedges in a pie chart add up to 100%, that a “pow!” exploding with stars conveys a painful punch in the face and that overlapping speech balloons convey interruption, and so on (see Figures 8a and 8b). These conventions can sometimes overwhelm legibility, as with the popular but notoriously difficult-to-read parallel-y-axis plot or baroquely hyperkinetic superhero fight scenes. As with genre literature, reliance on conventions facilitates new developments for insiders that can baffle readers who are unfamiliar with the form, which in turn motivates the sorts of swings between sophistication and simplicity that are characteristic of the history of popular music.

Figures 8a and 8b. We understand the motion and pain of the frog from the conventions of simple lines, swirls, and stars in this 1945 edition of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy (left). Likewise, the spare, unadorned presentation of points and lines conveys the covariation in the 1958 plot by Alban William Phillips (right), which efficiently depicts a historical relationship between inflation and unemployment in a now-familiar format of data and fitted curve, while at the same time arguably being misleading due to the convention that a scatterplot represents a causal relationship.

Mathematics, too, has advanced through the use of conventions, such as Leibiniz’s notation in differential calculus, or even more basic ideas such as the expression of mathematical reasoning in equations rather than words. Just as we can read an English sentence without needing to be aware of the individual letters in the words, and we can follow basic algebraic expressions without needing to puzzle over the meaning of the equals sign, we are accustomed to time series plots and sequential panels speech balloons and can see through these forms directly to the stories and data being conveyed.

Differences between these two modes of visual storytelling

Comics have been used to teach statistics, and data graphics have been used within comic strips; quantitative visualizations can be beautiful and comics can be informative. But these two forms of expression are generally used in different places and with different goals: explanation and mathematical understanding in one case, art and entertainment in the other. And yet, both have in common a mission of delivering an abstract concept efficiently within the constraints of their inherent structures, requiring such conventions as economy of line and messaging that registers intuitively for the reader. 

Different goals lead to different visual priorities: clarity in data graphics is absolutely necessary if any useful information is to be conveyed, whereas ambiguity in comics can help create suspense, point of view, and other dramatic effects. Comics, as with purely literary stories, typically follow a narrative structure—or, if not, are consciously operating in opposition to conventional narrative. In contrast, statistical graphics on the page are often static, taking the form of a single display rather than a sequence.

The content of single-panel cartoons and statistical graphs require a short but concentrated effort by the reader, while the sequentiality of comics leads to a much different reading experience. Most comics, like most films and works of literature, offer a guided reading experience, a sort of theme park ride in which the reader follows a story through a sequence of panels: in addition to providing the words and images, the authors dictate the structure and pace of the narrative. In contrast, when reading a time series or scatterplot, we perceive a general pattern and then can then focus on individual segments or points. When a graph is constructed as a trellis, or grid of small multiples, this just adds one more level for the reader, who can now slide up and down between individual points, subgraphs, and the entire picture. Indeed, we would argue that the sequentiality of comics and the all-at-onceness of statistical graphs are fundamental characteristics of these forms.

An early example of a small-multiples graph is Francis Amasa Walker’s state-by-state “gainful occupations” grid of 1874 (see Figure 9a), which appeared a century after William Hogarth’s groundbreaking series of prints of the Rake’s Progress. To the extent that each of Hogarth’s scenes is itself a detailed storyboard, the sequence as a whole feels less like a comic strip or bande dessinée and more like a sequence of static images.

Figures 9a and 9b. Francis Amasa Walker’s 1874 small-multiples graph lays out the ratios of those above the age of 10 who were employed or in school in the U.S., with each box representing a state (left). Hergé’s 1932 Tintin en Amérique (right) is similarly divided into discrete panels but, unlike the statistical graph, is intended to be read in order so that it forms a narrative..

A modern comic can be drawn beautifully, but its individual panels are directly read as part of a story rather than as individual tableaus. With statistical graphics, it is the opposite. News organizations now sometimes construct interactive data visualizations that explicitly guide the viewer, but to the extent that graphics support exploratory data analysis, it is often essential that the reading experience be open-ended and not directed by the creator of the graph.

Somewhere in between are dynamic scatterplots such as those developed and popularized by Hans Rosling, in which each circle represents a country and the graph refreshes for each year, with movement of the circles showing changes over time (see Figure 10a). From the audience’s perspective, this sort of “movie” is more of a guided tour than an open-ended exploration. It becomes an exploratory tool when the user is given the power to stop the motion of the image and look around, and to select what variables to display. The creation of animated graphs in open-source software such as R or Python facilitates both analysis and presentation when it comes to machine learning and is becoming standard with the younger generation of data-crunchers, and flowing geometries can be beautiful.

As discussed earlier, data visualization and comics both rely on conventions that serve as shortcuts to legibility. The establishment of conventions also gives the opportunity to push back against expectations, whether it be poems that don’t rhyme, machine-made art, neo-noir film, countercultural science fiction, or comic books and bandes dessinées such as Maus, Watchmen, and the Spirou of Émile Bravo that use traditionally genre materials to tell more serious stories. We see less of this sort of reaction in statistical graphics (setting aside jokes such as pie charts representing actual slices of pie or gimmick graphs such as bar plots showing the heights of buildings).

Figures 10a and 10b. The Swedish physician Hans Rosling developed and popularized the Trendalyzer software system that facilitates dynamic scatterplots that animate sequentially across time (left). Since the late 20th century, Chris Ware has been innovating comic strips and graphic storytelling with designs that sometimes resemble charts or technical drafting, as in this example from 2010 (right). He often bucks the conventions of temporal order with narratives that are chronologically shattered.

The arrow of time

A detective story will typically involve two time sequences: the forward sequence of (a) the motivation for the crime, (b) the planning of the crime, (c) the crime itself, (d) the aftermath, (e) the arrival of the detective, (f) the collection of clues, (g) the discovery of the solution of the crime, and (h) the unmasking and punishment or escape of the criminal. But this is not quite the sequence given in the story, which will typically follow an order such as d, e, f, c, g, b, a, h. These two different sequences roughly correspond to the processes of data generation and inference in statistics. Data generation goes forward in chronological time, while inference starts in the middle and goes back and forth in time.

The strict ordering that is typical of comics (setting aside experimental work such as that of Chris Ware; see Figure 10b) implies that some decisions need to be made about the sequence by which the story is experienced by the reader. In contrast, a static graph that appears all at once can imply different stories, depending on the order with which it is read. The title and caption of a graph can thus have a strong effect on its meaning, in the same way that point of view is important in storytelling.

Looking forward

It took a while for the methods of data visualization to detach from their original sources in mapping, astronomy, and economic and demographic time series; similarly, sequential art was slow to move into new domains beyond reportage and humor.

Both fields feature a series of technical developments that have facilitated communication through juxtaposition. A time-series plot contains no more information than a series of numbers, and a scatterplot is just a way of displaying a two-column table—but graphics allow visual comparisons in a way that the numbers do not. Similarly, a political cartoon or a single-panel gag employs a discrete, often uncomplicated tableau of squiggly ink lines and perhaps a splash of color to communicate the many layers of meaning that make up a joke or a sharp commentary. A sequential cartoon, in contrast, can be thought of as an annotated series of images or as illustrated prose, but it is more than either of these. In a graphic narrative, the forward progress of the story is governed by the architecture of the content flowing panel to panel. Advances in statistical graphics and comics have come from ever-evolving conventions such as grids of scatterplots and strips of panels, which represent conceptual leaps and in turn open the door to further developments.

At the same time, historical contingencies and the imperatives of commerce can lead to developments that are inherently unpredictable. To think of comics as a set of variations on the superhero form would be as limiting as to consider pie charts and histograms as the building blocks of statistical graphics. Superheroes, pie charts, and the cozy detective story are examples of subgenres that have taken up too large a space of their genres in the popular imagination, motivating strong reactions against these forms among authors and designers. When the goal is communication–whether to convey information or to tell a story-–there is a tension between the convenience of existing popular forms and the need to innovate to shake readers out of existing modes of thinking.

It has taken applied researchers a long time to realize that graphical visualizations of data and models are not just decorations to be added to make statistical results more accessible to lay readers; rather, they are a necessary part of any serious quantitative analysis. Similarly, the techniques and conventions of cartoons and comics are not just a way to make jokes or stories more accessible to children, any more than movies are just filmed books. In the famous words of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message.

Recognizing these historical parallels can point to potential future developments. We are in no position to say where comics and bandes dessinées, or literary or visual art more generally, could or should go next. But we can comment on something that statistical graphics can learn from comics, which is how to add some structure to the viewing experience. It should be possible to design graphs to support discovery of the unexpected without entirely leaving readers on their own during the process. This is especially a concern with big data: when the dataset is large and complicated enough, even an attempt to visualize all the data at once will require some choices. One way to approach this is to construct a sequence of graphs, starting with the big picture and then focusing on details. It can also help to accompany a graph with text suggesting how it is to be read, perhaps with further explanation using a sequence of images or a video. Shneiderman offers similar suggestions for computer-user interfaces, which is what data graphics are nowadays. A certain amount of storytelling or imposed structure can be necessary in the interpretation of data, just as we often need to embed real-world events into narratives in order to understand them.

The post Statistical Graphics and Comics: Parallel Histories of Visual Storytelling appeared first on Nightingale.

One reason to envy information designers of yesterday is the big canvases they got to play with. Look at this 1831 timeline compared to my iPhone. Big, right?

Time goes to the right. Different empires get their own swim lanes and colorful designations. Maybe you’ve seen something similar to this before.

But if you squint and read its title, you will see that this is Plate 1. The timeline keeps going . . . and going!

An Embellished Chart of General History and Chronology is an extraordinary work of chronography from 1831 London. Considering the history of colorful timelines, it stands out in many ways:

1. It is huge.
2. It is relatively early.
3. It seems unknown to modern researchers.
4. It is by a woman.

Frances Harriet Lightfoot published her chronology when she was 29 years old. More on her in a bit.

The design

Seven of the chronology’s plates fold out, including Plate 4, below. It’s a vertical monster—about 3 feet tall covering the final 500 years of the BC era. I count 134 distinct geopolitical rows.

If we zoom to the Golden Age of Athens on the same plate you can appreciate the chronology’s level of detail. I particularly like how years specific to events are labeled.

Lightfoot’s design jumps scales in the AD era. The same horizontal space is used to detail only 100 years, giving five times more room to illustrate history.

If we fly to the Roman Civil wars of the Tetrarchy we see how crazy a single lane can get!

Lightfoot’s volume begins with a three-paragraph preface, where she refers to herself in the third person:

. . . a work which is the offspring of research rather than of genius ; and it appeared to her that the study of Chronology might be rendered more attractive to the rising generation, by a new arrangement, in the form of the Chronological Tables, combining simplicity with comprehensiveness. . . .

She also includes a list of subscribing sponsors, and dozens of reference pages split between a long table of remarkable events not noticed in the chart, and table of celebrated persons grouped by theme (geographers, mathematicians, poets, etc.).

I studied two copies of Lightfoot’s chronology for this essay. Most of the images you see are from photography recently published by the David Rumsey Map Collection. I also consulted my own recently acquired copy. It’s fun comparing the differences in their hand coloring.

To me, the sensation of discovering and reading this work is overwhelming. As much as I have enjoyed its colors, my deepest curiosity is reserved for its creator.

Who is Miss Lightfoot? How did she come to create this monumental piece of information design? Why have I never heard of her?

After spending several days studying census, newspaper, and other public records, I have pieced together what I believe to be her first biographical sketch.

Meet Frances Harriet

Frances Harriet Lightfoot was born around 1802 in Lambeth, Surrey. She was a distinguished composer and author whose works left a broad mark in the 19th century.

Lightfoot signed off on the publication of her chronology from 14 Great James Street, New Palace (London) on October 1, 1831. It received coverage in the Sun (London) newspaper the following month:

“This work is so ingeniously arranged as to afford at once glance a clear and comprehensive representation of the state of all known contemporary nations, from the Deluge to the present period. A system better calculated to facilitate the acquisition of this most puzzling, yet most valuable part of historical knowledge could hardly, we should think, be imagined; but we are not aware of even the existence of another book which possesses similar advantages, or has any claims to rival it in the public estimation.”

—Sun newspaper, 30 November 1831

About 136 copies of the chronology were listed for subscribers, including a resident of Willsbridge House, indicating an early connection to Lightfoot’s future home. The subscriber list featured a varied and high-status group, including dukes, earls, admirals, baronets, and notable politicians, reflecting the publication’s support by many elites of society.

Today, about 15 copies of the work survive according to WorldCat, with ten in the UK and five in the USA.

Professorial ventures

A decade after the chronology’s publication, in 1841, Lightfoot lived with her father and her mother, also Frances Lightfoot. They were still at 14 James Street in the parish of St Margaret, Westminster, Middlesex. In addition to her parents, Frances Harriet, listed as a “Professor of Music,” lived with three other women.

In addition to her 1831 publication, Lightfoot authored A Genealogical List of the Sovereigns of England (1838), a stylized table across 13 pages.

She also published French Participles Explained and Made Easy in 1845, showcasing her diverse intellectual interests. But Lightfoot’s most prolific format was musical scores. Between 1828 and 1855, her compositions included ballads, songs, and duets, often collaborating with women lyricists. These musical pursuits align with her listed professional occupation of “Professor of Music” and her involvement in education, as reflected in her census household records, which frequently included pupils and other boarders.

By 1851, Frances Harriet had moved to 41 Cadogan Place in the prestigious Belgravia neighborhood of London where she was now head of a household including her 86-year-old mother, and several other women, including one visiting teacher, a pupil, and servants. There, she continued her professional pursuits, again listed as a “Professor of Music,” demonstrating her enduring commitment to education and the arts:

In 1861, Frances Harriet was recorded as a “School Mistress” at Willsbridge House in Bitton and Oldland. This residence, later known as Willsbridge Castle, has some musical roots. Built circa 1730 for John Pearsall, it passed through the Pearsall family, including composer Robert Lucas de Pearsall, known for his madrigals and Anglican church music. The house’s connection to such a prominent musical figure aligns with Frances Harriet’s own musical background.

Across 1851 and 1861 censuses, Lightfoot’s household included teachers and students, all women, reflecting her ongoing commitment to education and music.

Final years and legacy

Frances Harriet Lightfoot passed away aged 71 years old on July 14, 1873, at Willsbridge House. She was buried five days later at St. Mary Churchyard, Bitton, South Gloucestershire. Her will named two executors, with an estate valued under £600.

Lightfoot’s one-acre residence was auctioned the following January at the White Lion Hotel, Broad Street, Bristol. Willsbridge House was described as a substantial mansion with extensive amenities including stables, a coach house, a detached laundry, and well-maintained gardens, highlighted the grandeur of her home. The house itself featured spacious cellars, multiple reception rooms, numerous bedrooms, and a garden stocked with fruit trees and an abundant mineral spring. Its proximity to the Bitton Station on the Midland Railway further underscored its prime location.

These connections paint a picture of Frances Harriet Lightfoot as a well-connected, intellectually versatile, and respected figure in the musical circles of her time. They also suggest a woman who maintained significant properties and professional roles, demonstrating both stability and influence.

The consistent reference to Lightfoot as a spinster in various documents, including her will, indicates she remained unmarried throughout her life, which was relatively uncommon for women of her time and social status. This detail might have influenced her professional focus and independence.

Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s life reflects a woman deeply embedded in the intellectual and artistic fabric of her time. I am excited to learn about what you find studying her colossal chronology.

Lightfoot is a good reminder that the constellation of spectacular historic designs is only partially visible to our modern eyes. I look forward to seeing more.

Republished from https://www.chartography.net/p/colossal-chronography – sign up, it’s great!

The post Colossal Chronography: Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s 1831 Marvel appeared first on Nightingale.

Monroe N. Work was an African American sociologist, scholar, and researcher who spent his life collecting information and helping others to understand it. The highlight of his career, according to Work, was the nine editions of the Negro Year Book between 1912 and 1938. Each edition was an encyclopedic collection of yearly facts and data that covered many aspects of African American life as compiled by Work from data submitted from the wider community. Each subsequent edition quickly became the essential source of Black data in the United States and was reported on widely by the White and Black press and used as a resource equally in many schools in America and abroad. 

But their author, Monroe N. Work, remains far less known than his contemporaries W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington despite collaborating directly with both leaders. After sharing research with Du Bois early in his career, Work had the opportunity to start the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which was presided over by Booker T. Washington. 

This positioned him at the intersection of Black leadership and education in the US for most of his life, to which Monroe Work threw himself into the task of expanding public consciousness through data. In order to drive the importance of certain datasets, the Negro Year Book went a step further by featuring a number of hand-drawn charts focusing on education, healthcare, and mortality. 

Collecting data may not be the calling for the most extroverted people, and this certainly was the case with Monroe Work. He was a soft-spoken, hard-working, and tenacious collector of facts whose dedication to data provided generations of scholars with the empirical ammunition to fight for equality and justice.

Find all editions of the Negro Year Book, plus my full research documentation in this public folder.

The road to Tuskegee

Born to formerly enslaved parents, Work had a protracted education (he didn’t get to attend high school until the age of 23) which eventually brought him to enroll at the University of Chicago to become a sociologist. After graduating in 1903, Work moved to Savannah, Georgia to work at Georgia State Industrial College, which offered a small salary but gave him access to a vibrant Black community and a start for his research.  

Moving to Savannah provided Work proximity to W.E.B. Du Bois in Atlanta, who welcomed him into a long-standing collaboration as a fellow Black scholar. After publishing several articles in Du Bois’s journal at Atlanta University, Du Bois personally invited Work to the initial meeting of the Niagara Movement conference in 1905 as a member of the “Committee on Crime, Rescue, and Reform” as well as the “Committee on Interstate Conditions and Needs.” 

Savannah, Georgia was a charged social environment and Work flourished as a key member of Black society. He established the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club with over 300 members and featured speakers (including Du Bois, Robert E. Park, and others) sharing new ideas on education, healthcare, crime, housing, and other factors inhibiting social equity—topics known collectively at the time as the “Race Problem.” This gave Work a platform to mature professionally and share a number of important papers on health and crime, as well as his early research on African languages. Savannah was also where Work met his wife of 41 years, Florence Evelyn Hendrickson.

He quickly became professionally respected as a fastidious keeper of the facts and his activism-through-research caught the eye of Booker T. Washington, a skilled and charismatic orator, fund-raiser, and president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later University) in Alabama that pioneered industrial, agricultural, and higher-education for African Americans. Washington at first contacted Du Bois to start a history department at Tuskegee, but when he declined, Work was contacted to consider the post. The decision to move to Tuskegee seemed like an easy decision, here’s what Work—and his wife Florence—had to say about it:

After arriving in Alabama, Work created the “Plan for Making Tuskegee a Greater Center for Information Relating to the Negro,” which mapped out a system for expanding a library as well as a “systematic gathering of data” relating to the Black experience that encompassed both historical and current events.

After publishing his first few papers and pamphlets on behalf of his new department, Booker T. Washington suggested that Work publish a “yearbook of Negro progress” to honor the 50^th anniversary of emancipation in 1913. The first edition of the Negro Year Book was published as a joint effort by Work and Tuskegee in 1912 at a hefty 225 pages. It sold for 25¢ and was mailed for 5¢ more—which is equivalent to $10 today. The first edition sold 5,000 copies quickly, which provided the necessary funds and enthusiasm to triple the page count and print run by the 1914-15 edition.

The first edition of the Negro Year Book in 1912 set the tone for the series by dividing its content into three sections: an overview of African American life (with supporting data) in 1911, an overview of Black Americans in context to the world’s Black population, and a final section documenting the story of enslavement and emancipation. More than anything, the first edition essentially converted the assorted newspaper snippets and assorted data already collected by Work and his team as a first-of-its-kind resource for collective Black memory.

By the 1914 edition, the Negro Year Book also solicited facts about African Americans as part of a campaign to collect information. This took the form of a contest for the “most practical suggestion” with a hefty prize of $50 (roughly $1,500 today). Collecting information was central to Work’s plan for his department, and by this time he had already been receiving newspaper clippings, quotes, and assorted notes from universities and researchers across the country. By turning this into a contest, Work created a real incentive for laypeople to contribute, and in essence, it helped him to crowdsource his archive.

Author Linda McMurry elaborates on his impact in her book Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work:

While the Negro Year Book was, and still is, a valuable asset to the historian and sociologist, its impact was also significant among laymen. The facts it supplied inspired blacks with confidence in their ability to progress and refuted the rumors of black decline that were widespread among whites. The prestige of Tuskegee Institute lent credence to the facts presented in the yearbooks and allowed them to be distributed through white newspapers and to be accepted in both the North and South. There are many mentions of the Negro Year Book in newspapers across the country. A periodical called The Republic even declared, “The Social, legal, financial, and educational contrasts between the American Negro in 1863 and 1913 are by the very dispassion of their telling made miraculous. The book is written for reference use, yet many successive pages read like romance.”

Work himself considered the Negro Year Book as his most significant accomplishment, saying:

The answering of inquiries about the Negro, which came to Tuskegee from all parts of the world, became an important aspect of the work of the Department of Records and Research. I kept the recipes to all questions received. On the basis of these replies there was published in 1912 the first Negro Year Book, a compilation of facts relating to the Negro. Almost immediately the Negro Year Book became a standard reference on all matters pertaining to the race. Its circulation in the course of time became world-wide.

What follows is a series of examples from various editions of the yearbooks. Every edition focused on education, an area that Work was particularly passionate about. (I’ll explore other topics of interest in forthcoming articles.)

Visualizing educational inequality

Work added a series of charts on education in the 1914-15 edition. By the next edition in 1916-17, the education chapter was elaborated to 58 pages and included the most number of charts. While W.E.B Du Bois created remarkable charts for the 1900 Paris Exposition on the same subject, Work focused on the bigger story of American education and the lack of investment in Black children.  

The series of charts begin with “Per Cent Negro Children In School And Out,” which features horizontally stacked bar charts sorted by the percentage of Black children in school, with Oklahoma at the top with about 62% in school and Louisiana at the bottom with about 28%.

What is immediately evident is the humble way the chart is printed. The chart is straightforward and the design is clean despite being hand-drawn. The chart is arranged in three sections—the group at the top being above 50%, then Texas at 50%, and the rest of the states trailing below 50% (all of them Southern).

Work presented the data in this format originally in the 1914-15 edition but then reworked the design over the next 10 years. As you can see below, his first chart was hand-drawn, while the next two versions are printed as rudimentary bar charts. The last two versions include data on White students, but use tick marks to show those out of school. It’s interesting to consider how Work experimented with the design of this chart over time, yet collected the data in the same way from the beginning.

The second chart in the series is as unique as any that shape our field. In my opinion, it is equally as captivating as Florence Nightingale’s rose and as engaging as Du Bois’s spiral:

This is the 1914-15 version of the chart, and the first time it appears in the Negro Year Book. It is hand-drawn, like most of the charts from this edition, but the measured conception of the chart really packs a punch. “Days Of Schooling Per Year If Each Negro Child Of School Age Got His Share” is a unique design that connects Work’s statistical analysis directly to his argument of unequal investment in education. Each five-spotted dice pattern represents a week in school, each dot a school day.  

Work divides the total number of days attended by the number of children of school age to get the per-capita average for each state. It’s a great way to show the scale of the issue in a way that creates empathy and grabs attention. (On a personal note, can you imagine every African American child in Louisiana only being in school for a month and two days per year?)

Work hid the real surprise in a data table that followed the chart. There, he showed the average number of years that it would take a child to complete an elementary course (grades 1-8). By this accounting, it would take an African American person 33 years to get an elementary school education in South Carolina. 

This chart was recreated twice in the following editions. In 1916-17, the chart was typeset instead of hand-drawn:

While it’s interesting to consider how the impact of the hand-drawn versus printed charts cultivates different emotional responses, the data, itself, is equally stirring. While Louisiana and South Carolina are relatively unchanged, Maryland and North Carolina see significant improvement. Texas initially improves between the editions but then stagnates in the subsequent version.

The 1918-19 edition was the last year this chart was included, and it was oriented vertically on the page with more standardized typesetting. The story in the data is effectively the same with the overall trend in the data flattening out. Louisiana and Georgia see modest gains while South Carolina actually drops to 25 days annually, down from 26 days.

By changing the format and design of this chart, the charm is completely gone. The proximity of the dots doesn’t visually align with the idea of a five-spot dice and the numbers are lost on the page. It’s heartbreaking to see this version because it doesn’t live up to the impact of the previous versions. 

It’s uncertain what exactly changed, was this a different printer? Why did the orientation become vertical? Why did they use asterisks instead of dots? Regardless, it’s an interesting exercise in design exploration. It’s clear that Monroe Work could visualize data to make an efficient and compelling argument, but access to funding and technology likely forced him to focus his efforts elsewhere.

The next chart in the series compares investment in White versus Black schools.

The chart is sorted in descending order by White investment and the bars themselves appear to be made from a kind of tape in the printing process. As you’ll see this technique is used across many of Work’s charts and I assume this is due to how the book was printed, likely using an offset lithography process—the standard at the time. 

While the story in the data is clear, the chart could be made more self-evident. As I show in this chart based on the original data, if Work would have removed some of the states where investment was more equitable, then the scale of unequal investment in Black and White schools would be more obvious. But this was not his intention, as Work was interested in presenting as much data as possible to challenge popular opinion and erode misconceptions.

Work’s factual approach furthered his book’s reach significantly by making it less controversial for White publications and schools to cite. The Virginia Vicksburg Herald published a feature article calling the 1915-16 edition “helpful and inspiring almost beyond measure,” while the Denver Star called Work an “Historian who knows his business.” The Colorado Statesman even ran a front-page essay about the overall inspiration of his work concluding with thanks to Work for “this timely message to our people… for the benefit of making them firmer in the cause that concerns them and is of the greatest importance in their lives.” Because Work collected and presented the data without emotion, it gave visibility to the facts at a time when prejudice could easily have omitted them. (See here for my collection of reporting on Work and the Negro Year Book.)

Interestingly enough, the previous edition of the Negro Year Book in 1914-15 featured a novel and very different approach to this data:

I’ve mentioned the humble printing methods of the book mainly because they stand out for their ingenuity despite an obvious lack of resources. The sophistication of the story of Work’s data is nuanced and clever; its hand-made nature appeals to us as dataviz practitioners because we can see the hand behind the analysis.  

This chart is essentially a unit chart of “$” signs struck many times with a typewriter to create a crude icon for “dollar.” These units are arranged in rows with the corresponding amount at the end of each row. We see the values for White and Black schools with the most per capita spent in Washington, DC. For Mississippi, we are left with only 93¢—not even enough for a single icon.

Again, we see Work experimenting with the format of the chart to make a point. One certainly wonders if Work had seen Du Bois’s Paris Exhibition charts, or if he was informed by other charts used in sociology. There are references to additional charts by Work and his department in an exhibition at the Georgia State Fair in 1908 and also in some of his earlier pamphlets. Further research is needed to help them come to light.

While the publication was expanding between the editions—from 228 pages to 488 in just three years—Work emphasized collecting more facts. Following each of Work’s charts is a table of the data. Interestingly, there isn’t a chart on this data on the number of teachers despite the inclusion in the paragraph that introduces the chapter on education. It is fascinating all the same.

In order to highlight access to education, Work focuses the next two charts and a map to explore Illiteracy:

Work shows that African American illiteracy in 1915-16 was clearly connected to age and geography. The data is stark. The depth of illiteracy in the Southern states presages the impending Northward Black Migration for better living conditions.  

The next chart shows the total scale of education by attainment for African Americans. It’s a chart that Work continues to publish even after the rest of the charts fall away in later editions because I believe it shows the urgency of Black scholarship. 

The remaining suite of three charts round out the yearbook’s education chapter and are included and updated from the second edition of 1913-14 through the eighth edition of 1931-32 in similar formats. All are created out of the same “tape” to create the bar charts.

In these charts, Work explains the finance of Black education. These numbers would have signified vast amounts of money at the time. Collecting and quantifying the sum total of Black education in America shows the scale of the inequity in a way that few other metrics can. While the African American population is an ethnic minority in the United States, the data proves how little had been invested at a time when the need for education would have been imperative. By compiling the total costs for all education, then breaking out the funding opportunities available, Work not only points the way for other Black educators to get access to funds (which he lists in detail at the end of the chapter) but also brings his story full circle in detailing the massive investment by African Americans directly into their community schools.

Setting the record (straight)

At the beginning of his career in sociology, at the age of 37, Monroe N. Work began to define what would be his life’s work: “If Sociology has primarily to do with human beings in their associative capabilities, then its primary function is thorough investigation and research, to collect a body of information that will point out, make clear, what these relationships are and what in the present, the now, should be done in order that these relationships may be made more harmonious, more just and proper.”

Work’s collaborator and friend Jessie P. Guzman noted in writing his obituary:

Work biographer Linda McMurry writes, “The principle driving force in Work’s life was neither accommodation nor protest, rather it was an abiding faith in the ‘impact of fact’. His main concern was to obtain the best possible outlet for the fruits of his research.”  A few chapters later, she adds, “With his faith in the impact of fact and his uncharismatic demeanor, Work’s quiet, scholarly presentations were in keeping not only with Tuskegee’s program but also with his own personality… Indeed, throughout his almost 40 years at Tuskegee, Monroe Work was a quiet but insistent voice for change in the institute’s approach to both education and race relations.”

Through a steadfast belief in facts, Monroe N. Work not only established the structure for how data on African Americans was collected, but he also invested his life in presenting it to the world at large. There is much in Work’s life to share; in a follow-up to this story, I’ll present a body of charts that he created to effect dramatic improvements in African American health conditions. 

Special thanks

Monroe Work first came to my attention by Dr. David H Jackson Jr., Provost of North Carolina Central University. It was his guidance to explore the Negro Year Book which has continued my exploration into Black scholarship. I believe that data visualization may have played a significant role for many activists and scholars throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement among them.

Thanks very much to Emily Barone for editing!

You can find every image from this article as well as all editions of the Negro Year Book here in this public Google folder containing all my research materials:

While Monroe Work is a remembered figure in African American history, his life has not received much documentation. There is only one book about his life and work, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work by Linda O. McMurry from 1985. Her care and deep empathy for Work’s life does his legacy a great service.

Prior to McMurry’s biography, an accounting of Work’s life was compiled in 1949 as an in-depth obituary by Jessie P. Guzman, who collaborated with Work from 1938-44 when she took over for him after his retirement at the Tuskegee Institute Department of Records and Research.  She went on to compile and edit two subsequent volumes of the Negro Year Book in 1947 and 1952. 

There is also a lengthy article, “You Can’t Argue with Facts: Monroe Nathan Work as Information Officer, Editor, and Bibliographer,” by Mark Tucker published in 1991. While he focuses on an enormous bibliography that Work assembled later in his career, it is a great summation of his work and contains additional research and scholarship.

Additional links

Monroe Work portrait in National portrait gallery: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_S_NPG.67.28

Site created highlighting Work’s documentation of Lynching: https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/

Tuskegee archives: http://archive.tuskegee.edu/repository/digital-collection/the-negro-yearbook/

The post Pioneer in Black Data: Monroe N. Work and the Negro Year Book appeared first on Nightingale.

In 1929, the US Great Depression emphasized a series of structural weaknesses in the US economy (and social fabric). Herbert Hoover’s ineffectual political response resulted in one of the biggest landslide victories in US politics to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1932. In Roosevelt’s first 100 days he outlined The New Deal which ultimately took the form of 69 independent agencies (many of which are still in place today) each with their own mission, staff, and budgets.

One of these agencies was the Resettlement Administration, which relocated struggling families to communities planned by the federal government and was headed by Rexford Tugwell. A remarkable man of influence and controversy, Tugwell was an economist, part of Roosevelt’s “brain trust” which helped to engineer the New Deal, and was committed throughout his life to anti-poverty experimentalism in government planning. But American dirty politics being what they are, Tugwell became a target of Congressional opponents of the New Deal, who saw him as a Communist and smeared him with the nickname “Rex the Red”.

But image-making is an important aspect of shaping public opinion and Tugwell was cognisant of his political reputation. He knew that in order to influence American attitudes towards accepting the New Deal, he would need to actually show people suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and then communicate their suffering to the public at large. He would need to give people a reason to care.

To do so, he appointed a former student of his, Roy Stryker, as “Chief of the Historical Section”. Stryker set off to document the Americans trapped in a devastated landscape without opportunity. To do this, he hired photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Ben Shahn to find and memorialize images that transcended their subject matter with artistic compositions and emotional appeal. To say the highly influential program was a success is an understatement. Many of these documentary photographs went on to become famous across the world and are now considered among the most important photographs in history.

The success of this project helped “the Historical Section” to be restructured into the new, larger Farm Securities Administration (FSA) in 1937. While the FSA was one of the smaller agencies, it provided many other Works Projects Administration (WPA) agencies with visual support throughout the period.

From documentary image to exhibition spectacle

Stryker’s leadership and ability to craft a marketing campaign was more than just a job, it was an act of idea evangelism. Photography was only one aspect of the work of the Historical Section and all types of designers and craftspeople were also employed for the common cause.

As Jennifer Stoots points out in her essay All things to all people: The aestheticization and commodification of Farm Security Administration documentary photographs, “The photographers working for Stryker were directed to photograph specific people, families and areas that would benefit from New Deal programs; they were to create photographic documents for government use… By 1936, and in addition to print materials, ads and images for press, the Resettlement Administration also organized major educational exhibits. These shows included oversized photo murals, photo collages and large text inserts.”

One of these exhibitions was in San Diego, created for the California Pacific International Exposition in May 1936 — as seen in the photograph at the top of this article. The exhibit was so physically large that no single photograph exists, so I have collaged additional images below to show the full scope of the exhibit:

San Diego was a perfect place for such an educational exhibit organized to support Southern California’s slowing economy. Crowds swarmed the Expo to view exhibits on history, the arts, industry, and science. But the Expo also provided some unusual displays such as a kitschy gold mine in Gold Gulch, an early robot called “The One Ton Mechanical Man” and the purely exploitive “Zoro Garden Nudist Colony”.

The connection to the New Deal also extended to the new buildings themselves, as the Expo was built in part by relief workers from the WPA. Roosevelt himself came to San Diego to seal the deal, delivering a stirring speech to vouch for New Deal programs. He addressed a crowd of 60,000 people inside and 15,000 outside the nearby San Diego Stadium, speaking about “the products of American artistic and mechanical genius” and “of what the nation can achieve on a broad scale.” It was a huge success with 7,220,000 visitors during its 377 days of operation.

Problem & progress: applying pictorial statistics for education

The New Deal era was as politically complex as any other moment in history. The confluence of social, technological, aesthetic, and political factors created a unique playground for artists, designers, and scientists to explore visual and ideological conventions.

Among the influx of ideas was Otto Neurath’s Isotype, which began to blow over from Vienna in the early 1930s, and featured most prominently in the socialist-leaning periodical Survey Graphic. The subject of a feature article called “Social Showman” published a few months after the exposition opens, Neurath’s theories are neatly outlined for the American audience, including this section on communication ideals: “To be sure, Neurath respects and draws upon advertising and propaganda experience. But the product he has to sell is enlightenment. Hence his charts, as was his museum, are not composed of competing parts, or messages, but aim toward visual cooperation.”

It might come as no surprise that flanking the larger photographic mural at the Resettlement Administration exhibit are two walls of hand-painted pictorial statistics. While these are not true Isotype charts, they both show a heavy Neurath influence in the design and ideology.

Pictorial statistics were steadily creeping into New Deal publications as well as an urgency to communicate using the language of advertising. Dori Griffin’s essay in Communication Design, Posters for public health: WPA posters and national dialogues about health care in the United States elaborates: “The relative age of the issuing agency influenced how likely that agency was to engage with visual messaging in a broad public context. Thus the WPA, as a young government agency, enthusiastically embraced public media campaigns. Where and how the posters appeared was a topic that received attention, as well. Professional journals advised public health officials as to which messages belonged in which locations. In general, posters were distributed primarily to [neighborhood] residents, but also to doctors and dentists, and to schools, welfare and health agencies, stores, industrial plants, banks, motion picture theaters, clubs, and restaurants.”

The flat, graphic style of Isotype also lent itself readily to the method of poster printing and design. Griffin notes “The use of Isotype-style icons and illustrations was generally hailed as an aesthetic advancement for government-sponsored design. Isotype-style posters received favorable reviews because of their graphic simplicity, their ability to intuitively communicate factual information and relationships, and their assumed (though, of course, not actual) universality.”

Griffin continues, “‘Under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration the Neurath pictograph technique [i.e., Isotype] was introduced in chart-making, and the Works Progress Administration is now carrying on that work,’ wrote the Assistant Director of Information for the Resettlement Administration, a short-lived New Deal agency, in 1937. However, he concluded that despite these advances, ‘[g]overnment poster work in many respects is inadequate and unimaginative and it is only in recent years that layout and design have made any measurable typographic advance,’ pointing toward the work of WPA poster artist Lester Beall as an exemplar of ‘excellent poster work.’”

LEFT: “Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief agree…these books are too good to miss!” Federal Art Project 1936 | RIGHT: “Occupations related to industrial arts” by Blanche L. Anish, 1936

A closer look at the Resettlement Administration exhibit at the San Diego Exposition

Exploring the details of the exhibit design reveals some interesting norms both in the creation of pictorial statistics, but also in information design at the time.

The panel on the left side, which explores the statistical problems that the exhibit was trying to rectify, is the more pictogram focused of the two walls. Looking closer, it appears that it was painted in long strips, then tacked onto the wall. While the painting is flat and very consistent, the shading on the trees and the dots on the wife’s dress shows the hand of the unknown artist.

The design of the individual icons on the panel follows a sort of flat, modernist aesthetic. The organization of the pictograms is arranged from largest to smallest as the viewer scans down the wall from 10 units at the top to three units at the bottom.

Interestingly, the argument is focused on the minority unit of each pictogram, such as “one out of three homes in the US is below the standard.” On the far left, we see a foreclosed farm, a family at the relief bureau, and a dilapidated house, all situated in huge proportions to the total US. While the people show no emotion, they are highlighted by darker colors.

But this is just the introduction of a persuasive argument posed by the exhibit. By framing the problem (in this case literally in the title “Resettlement’s Problem” at the top of the wall) by using Isotype charts is a compelling way to orient the audience to the scale of the situation. This then naturally flows into the main section of the exhibit to further explain with high impact graphics and mural-sized photographs.

It only makes sense that the last portion of the exhibit, on the right, shows the potential results of this public investment through a series of charming hand-painted illustrations. These qualitative designs focus on the outcomes of government intervention. These designs are not isotypes at all, but rather icons situated in idealistic environments portraying the assumed outcome. These numbers are not statistics — they are goals.

The top panel shows the resplendent future that results in transforming unsuitable farmland into grazing land or even converting to parks. It’s a sort of Shangri-La for cows facing to the left.

The second panel pictures serene homesteads with abundant fields of wheat. The amber waves of grain flow to the right.

Half-a-million farm families are kept off the dole because of responsible farming practices or strategic interventions by the government. Notice the idealized pre-nuclear family leaning to the left again.

At the bottom, we see the biggest promise of all. Our wavering composition is resolved in a stable, prosperous landscape of houses and farms across a flat horizon. Clouds and mountains dance in the background.

Homeownership was far from omnipresent in 1936. Due to the depression, 25% of all mortgages were in default, which ultimately bottomed out in 1940 with only 44% of all Americans owning their homes — the lowest point in the 20th century. Homeownership is the actual outcome of the American dream—the anthesis of the plundered, weak landscape, and defeated population of the photographs to the left.

Leaving the audience with the promise of owning their own home if they cooperated with the Resettlement Administration would have been extremely enticing. It was all an act of idea evangelism.

Why would novelty matter?

As I started exploring this exhibit I started considering the concept of novelty. What’s the difference between using an Isotype versus a bunch of bar charts? Why would the designers create this on such a massive scale? While answers can be found in the information design of the overall exhibit (and those goals would be likely tied back to the highest-level communication needs of Roy Stryker and the Historical Section outlined at the beginning of the article) the ultimate answer is to try to make something that connects to people. To make something novel.

The definition of novelty is “the quality of being new, original, or unusual”. One can consider many of the greatest works of dataviz as being inherently novel, not only in their ability to give shape to data in a new form but also to capture the imagination of their audience. Because of their novelty, these unique data visualizations stand out, they look different; maybe even challenging the audience to explore the design more like a “game” to find the insight lurking within.

Isotypes create a special bond with your audience by replacing “hard numbers” with icons that your audience can identify with more easily. Isotype charts are suitable for communicating abstract ideas as well as quantitative facts equally. The charts in the exposition communicate abstract ideas (1-out-of-3 homes is sub-standard) and quantitative facts (Homes are being built for 100,000 people).

Certainly, the scale of this exhibit would also be novel. Creating any chart (or photograph, or text) on this kind of scale would separate it from our normal expectations and set it apart — and that is exactly the point. In an International Exposition such as this, with millions of viewers and a crushing amount of distracting content, novelty is ultimately the deciding factor to set apart an exhibit in the memory of the audience.

The post The Influence of Isotype in New Deal Information Design: A Resettlement Administration Exhibition, 1936 appeared first on Nightingale.

While many have discussed and explored the team’s work over the years (to which I have recently tried to shine a light on the pioneering role of Marie Neurath in particular) it is also common to be a little confused about what an Isotype actually is. More so, the story of the Isotype begins in the mid-1920s and spans all the way to 1971 when Marie retired, so there is a lot of work to consider.

What better way to learn more about Isotype and gain inspiration from their designs than to view and discuss the work itself?

This article — part of a series on Isotype — seeks to explain and celebrate the work of the Isotype Institute while revealing the process and design concepts used to create it. By focusing on the books published by Adprint from 1941–48, I want to explore the techniques and mindset behind each chart and the system behind the combined series in order to inspire new information design concepts today.

Isotype Institute: Creating A New Life in England

As I discussed in my last article, Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister were ensnared in a British internment camp after they fled the advancing Nazi army in 1941. They quickly married after they were released, and a year later, Otto and Marie co-founded the Isotype Institute. That same year, the Isotype Institute found an important collaborator with a book packaging company called Adprint.

Founded by a fellow Austrian, Adprint’s collaboration with the Isotype Institute led to the creation of a number of books that promoted cultural understanding between Britain and its allies during the war. As the war was still in full swing, Adprint and the Neuraths collaborated with the British government to create two series of books that featured Isotypes: “America and Britain” followed by “The Soviets and Ourselves”. Each book was by a different author and the Isotype charts have no real overlap with the writing in each book (other than the general subject matter) so the Isotype Institute was given additional credit as authors on the cover.

They began working on the charts for the book series — Otto in research and Marie in ‘Transformation’ (a skillset using research, data science, and design process) — but as they were working Otto suddenly died, presumably of a stroke. Now, on her own, Marie writes in her memoir “I had to carry the work on, and I had to take final responsibilities myself.”

A transitional period in the evolution of Isotype

This series of books represents an interesting moment in the life of the core team of Otto, Marie, and Gerd. In 1940 Gerd Arntz, a German-born artist who helped refine the aesthetics of Isotype by applying his modernist design sensibilities chose to remain in the Netherlands as the Neuraths fled the war. The Neurath’s retained basic design elements from the years of collaboration with Arntz — and indeed agreed that they collectively ‘owned’ the work — but did not have contact with him for a few years after they settled in England.

This series of Isotype charts in these two book series is, in some ways, the pinnacle of Isotype design. Otto and Marie’s collaboration on these books would have been some of the last projects that Otto worked on before his death and also shows the first steps by Marie in evolving the form and visual language of Isotype. The line between what was planned and designed before and after his death is something I couldn’t find details on. Otto was alive for the duration of the design and publishing of the first three books in the series “America and Britain”. The second three books in the “The Soviets and Ourselves” series were completed by Marie and her new team.

The First Lesson of Isotype: Qualitative and Quantitative

The first concept to understand is that Isotypes often mix qualitative and quantitative data. By simplifying the concepts trying to be communicated (often qualitative) and then elaborating with pictograms (quantitative), Isotypes aggregate both types of information into an easy-to-understand message. Of course, they do this in many ways so we’ll examine just how they do this in the examples below.

Only An Ocean Between, 1943

(Images from Thom White’s Blog, cover from Eagereyes, and author’s copy.)

The first book from the “America And Britain” series was written by Lella Secor Florence, an American pacifist and feminist living in England. It was created to educate the people of both countries on the differences and similarities in geography, climate, population, and touches lightly on infrastructure and business. It contains some of the more iconic Isotypes that we see referred to regularly in books and online. Of the three books in the series, it focuses the most on the cultural commonalities and comparisons between the two countries.

It is important to point out that while many of these images and charts have been shared, few of them have been actually discussed for their content. That said, noted dataviz historian Robert Kosara also covered this Isotype book (and others) with a number of keen observations and shares a passion for explaining the nuance of the work itself, so check out his work if this is interesting for you. Hopefully, others will join in too, as there is so much work to explore and discuss.

The first Isotype in the book is a map of Great Britain, which includes the whole of England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland. It has one of the few indications to the actual text of the book, with the names of landmasses, rail lines, elevation, and some special locations added for good measure.

Like most Isotype charts, this map’s function is to get the reader acquainted with the geography and infrastructure by simplifying the information it portrays. Interesting to note how the locations, transportation, and elevation are mixed in the map above. The detail for each is reduced to show the proximity and location while still surfacing the relative complexity of the map. Certainly, we are culturally used to seeing multi-dimensional maps, but the selected focus in these two maps is consistent with how the other Isotype charts ride the line between simplicity and complexity.

Like the Great Britain map, the map of the United States provides a high-level geographic understanding of American cities, topography, and rail lines along with locations of importance referenced in the text such as the Boulder Dam. It acts as a sort of meta-legend to orient the reader to the places and scale of the United States. The subtlety in the color and linework in signifying the difference between natural and political borders shows the care used in crafting it.

Like the map of Britain above, this map also shows a selective focus and attention to presenting information in larger units. By only displaying the rail lines which enabled western expansion, they show the massive distances covered, and touch on the preponderance of track in the eastern third of the country in a subsequent map. The elevations on this map are also reduced into three groups: low, medium and high to indicate a broad understanding of the regional differences. Lastly, the distance legend also breaks up its 500-mile length into five units reinforcing the visual vocabulary.

By grouping both countries under the title “Our Weather” it shows a unity between the 2 countries despite the huge difference in the range of temperature changes, across seasons, and the natural phenomena that influence them. In the US, we see 2 blocks representing Winter and Summer, with Minneapolis and New Orleans plotted as extremes and New York City tucked in the middle. The arrows to the right literally point out the differences in latitude and double as diagrams of the warm Gulf Stream and arctic Labrador current off the American coast.

While more data could have surfaced in this chart, the Neurath’s focused on two seasons (hot and cold) linked to three US cities/regions (hot, temperate, cold) broken into four temperature units. The use of color is systematic — freezing light blue, cool blue, warm yellow, and hot red — showing the overlap between countries, and is also applied to the arrows reflecting the weather influences as well. The text below the chart reinforces the message and links the two climates which, on the surface seem very different, but are actually linked by global conditions.

“Our Weather” shows a comparison between the temperature and rainfall in London and New York. The text at the bottom explains that contrary to the stereotype, NYC actually gets more rain by volume than London, while London is certainly more overcast.

The Isotype system is again applied to create an efficient and logical diagram. The color scale continues from the previous chart, showing the four temperature ‘strips’ with the dual thermometer shapes representing the minimum and maximum temperatures in black for each. The 12 blocks represent the months per year that it regularly rains in each city while the density of the diagonal lines represents the flow of rain.

The page design is also laid out like a table, with the two cities aligned to the left, labels right-aligned in the center, and the diagrams on the right. This information architecture supports an easier comparison between the different types of data and creates a clear story that belies its complexity.

One of the more well-known Isotype charts is “The Ocean Shrinks”. It shows the time gains in travel via technology from a historical perspective but does so by creating the unusual metaphor of a shrinking ocean. The ingenious label on the row with the airplane explains that each wave represents one travel day, which helps the reader understand the chart as distance per unit of time. So distance collapses into time and the ocean indeed shrinks.

The shrinking distance also reinforces the growing ‘closeness’ of the two countries and cultures. The subtle update across each of the four time periods in the illustrations of London and New York also creates visual interest and adds nuance to the progressive story. (By the way, the archaic spelling of ‘to-day’ is just unusual. Otto was known for his many typos and grammatical errors when corresponding with friends)

The two pages above (presented together but not like this in the book) flip the perceived narrative about connectivity and transportation. While the US is considerably larger than England, its smaller landmass allows for its rail infrastructure to be more interconnected than the U.S. by almost 100 years.

The detail on the train illustrations is approximate yet informative. Sporting a modernist flat aesthetic, each engine reflects a typology of train design per era for comparison. The shade of red on the brown-grey for the maps and the pure red for the train helps tie the whole design together and affords a connection between the two.

“United States and Great Britain in the World” shows a greatly aggregated view of the entire population of the world’s population by race. The design is segmented by a combination of country and region and the racial makeup has been grouped into five categories, by color, each displayed by a customized icon.

The team regularly recycled this design to ensure that the data or story being discussed was considered with an understanding of the statistical racial footprint. The above chart is a design that the Isotype Institute had been iterating on since at least since 1932, as seen in the publication that matches the name of Otto’s museum in Vienna, the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschafts on page 23.

Otto Neurath fiercely opposed any kind of racism throughout his entire career. While the icons in this Isotype chart representing the races of the world do not fit in our cultural norms for inclusivity today, Neurath’s intention was exactly the opposite at the time. The fact that Neurath represented the non-white population was a radical concept, as the very existence of these populations were regularly ignored. Then, by showing the white, western world that they were not the majority, Neurath challenged the notion of cultural supremacy held by many academics but especially by Nazi Germany. The icons themselves are not unequal in any way and the white population is outlined as to visually recede into the background. While the Isotype Institute was focused primarily on presenting facts, they did regularly display a certain educational agenda — likely originating in their leftist intellectual involvement in “Red Vienna” in the years before WW2. While the updated version of “Only An Ocean Between” is nearly identical to its predecessor, it has been further reduced to show larger regional groups with fewer icons overall. By pointing out the surprising statistic on the corresponding black populations and also referencing the scarcity of Native Americans in the US, Neurath points out the racial inequality in a subtle but pointed way. Fellow Nightingale writer Paul Kahn also points out that the chart was a product of the Colonial world, by grouping the brown half-icon for the Philippines with the US population as it was a US colony at this time.

The United States is a big place and “Area and Population” shows just how big and sparsely populated it is by comparing each region to other countries of comparable size and density. You’ll notice that the unit of measure (100K square miles) is consistently applied across all countries, it’s layout is a sort of small-multiple with the population overlaid on each. By coloring the US as Blue and Britain as Red it keeps the focus on each while including the grey for global comparison.

The above diagram is a type of map that is unique to the Isotype. It shows the shape of the country with three cross-sections showing the altitude of the landscape plus the kind of vegetation or crop that is known for that region. Turn the page and you’d see the US version below, note the matching colors and icons for both maps.

The American version of the same map shows a different picture in terms of scale and natural resources. An expanded series of icons represents a generalized layout of major crops, mountains, and forests. It’s clear that the US has vastly more natural resources than England but the range of resources is also clear. The design helps to convey a tremendous amount of information very efficiently. Imagine seeing an Isoline map displaying the same data; it would provide a more granular view of the data but could only display a single aspect, the altitude or the vegetation/crop but not both.

Like everything in the Isotype system, every aspect of the map is reduced to convey the general information. The brilliantly reduced legend is no exception, showing only a horizontal line for length and a right triangle for altitude. The legend integrates into each map very perfectly and matches the general understanding that is intended.

Comparing the maps requires attention to the details as the 5:1 ratio reveals they are not on the same scale. While the legend is clearly labeled, we don’t register the difference in the scale because we are not looking for that kind of comparison. As readers, we are only looking for general locations.

Because of their past in creating museum exhibitions, Otto and Marie often created Isotype charts to be read in sequence. This Isotype chart builds nicely from the preceding map by exploring the role of farmers and the land. Likewise, it also borrows a similar design (by unit) as seen in “Area and Population” before the maps. The scythe icon on each figure had been previously used by the Isotype Institute to represent agricultural workers but this chart introduces it for the first time in this book.

“Farm and Farm Workers, 1935” compares three types of workers: farmer (black), working relatives of farmers (blue), and hired labor (red). Each icon represents 100,000 workers, each cell represents 100,000 farms assorted into groups of five. While it takes a second to read the chart, there are two immediate understandings: that Britain has far fewer farms than the US, but hires far more laborers per farm. The text at the bottom explains the details.

We’ve seen how Isotypes group and organize both qualitative and quantitative data in the charts above. “Population and Live Stock” is a great example of how the design of the grouped icons helps to reveal the story despite groups that are very different sizes.

The focus of the chart is not the overall size of the populations, but a subtle insight to tell a more interesting story. By breaking the larger US population into three equal rows, it helps to make a more natural comparison between all four rows. Paul Kahn adds, “UK population in 1939 was 47.5M. US population in 1939 was 130.9M. This chart simplifies these numbers to emphasize the 1:3 ratio. So you can see there are three times as many Americans who eat less sheep and more pigs and cows.” Marie Neurath’s work as the Transformer in collecting the data, calculating the story, and designing its layout is complicated when you think about it, but the ultimate simplicity of the design makes it simple and elegant. Comparatively speaking, the British rely more on sheep than the US.

Every detail of an Isotype chart is considered — even the direction of the icons. Having the animals move in the direction of the X-axis (from left to right) it helps establish how they are read, both in the same (visual) way that we read a horizontal bar chart, but also (conceptually) that the animals are an independent population from the people. Had the animals faced toward the people it might have a different meaning as animals in line to be eaten — but that’s a different chart in a later book in the series.

“The World’s Merchant Marine” helps us to understand just how many ships the British Navy has in relation to the total number of ships globally. It also helps us understand the quantity of coal-burning (black), “oil-burning” (green) and wind-powered by creating icons for each. The 6×7 block of British ships in 1914 becomes the predominant group of measure, showing not only how the British Navy was equal to all ships in the world minus the Americans, but also how they modernized their fleet by 1939. The chart is easy to make comparisons not only between the two countries in focus but in the context of the entire world’s fleets.

This is another favorite subject of Otto’s, having created a similar version 11 years earlier in 1932. In the earlier version, the extended flags created a sort of diverging bar chart to show the rapid growth of the American Navy. The ship icons below each bar represent 5 million gross tons (instead of 500,000 in the one above) and the story is not only the growth of global shipping but the strength of the British and American navies.

The difference between “The World’s Merchant Marine” and the earlier 1930 version (at left) is significant in two ways. First, it tells a different story by focusing on the growth in the tonnage of ships over 79 years. By visualizing the icons as 5 million tons we see a more easily compared “bar” of ship icons that are equal in color with more fidelity in nationality. Second, in the earlier version of the chart, it shows the growth of the American Navy, whereas the latter shows the massive power of the British Navy. Because of the comparison between the two versions, we can see how important the layout and quantity of the icon units are to interpret the message.

Isotypes were often criticized for the data that was omitted or aggregated. The left page, “Imports and Exports per Head, 1935” would certainly be an example of why. We are presented with two diagrams comparing the total average person’s imports and exports for both countries. While it is easy to see the difference, it is not very easy to understand what the arrows represent, made especially more troubling by the lack of numbers. Sure, the text below explains that Americans are far more self-sufficient and that the British ultimately manufacture the vast majority of their exports, but the scales are too mysterious.

The right page, “Power Used per Head, 1935” is easier to scan, and shows a snapshot of global energy use by type (oil, coal, and hydro). The countries are ordered by longitude, North America first, then South America, Europe, then the far east. The inclusion of hydroelectric is likely a nod to the increases in the American infrastructure as a result of the Public Works Administration which the Isotype Institute explores in the 3rd book in the series, “Our Two Democracies At Work”.

The map in “Occupations” shows a different kind of grouping mechanism than we see in this book (but we do see throughout this series). It breaks the US into three areas for comparison to Britain as a whole. By doing so it creates regions that are non-traditional but are still meaningfully comparable. For example, the Northern third of the US has more workers overall, but comparatively fewer than the South. The West has a fraction of the population from the other two, but it is distributed similarly to the North. Britain and the North share a similar make-up of occupations, probably because of British immigrants to that region.

As we have seen in other charts in this book, the grouping of the information really affects what is being communicated. By reducing this map to only three parts for the US and one for the British, it also focuses the reader’s attention. Likewise, The grouping of the icons into clusters of 10, also allows the eye to quickly sum the data as well.

The last Isotype in this book is the global map of “Coal and Oil Production”. It shows exactly how disproportionate the US, England, and Europe were to the rest of the world in fossil fuels in 1937. While the icons are approximations, it is clear to see who had it and who did not. The single barrel of oil in “Southern Asia” (current Saudi Arabia) in interesting as oil was discovered in the region in 1908 but did not take over the global demand for oil until the 70s and 80s.

Lastly, note the consistent use of icons for coal and oil across all the charts in the book. By the time this book was made, Otto and Marie were using a very consistent set of icons tested in their Vienna museum, and the color usage is consistent with earlier charts in the book as well.

The First In A Series

The charts in “Only An Ocean Between” typify the approach made by the Isotype Institute during this period. Otto and Marie took a systematic approach to craft a larger system for understanding the meta-story, broke this larger narrative into themes, then focused each chart in the series to tell a story. It is brilliant work that builds a cohesive approach to educating the public on the core concepts of the book. The next book in the series, “Our Private Lives”, continues the systematic exploration by focusing on the cultural life of the two countries.

This article comes as part of a series on Isotype and derives mainly from research on the design process created by the team at the Isotype Institute, and the life and work of Marie Neurath. My goal is to teach people about the techniques and mindset of this data-driven design team, in order to inspire new information design concepts today.

Major thanks to Alyssa Bell, RJ Andrews, Georges Hattab, Paul Kahn, and Elijah Meeks for the editing and continued support!!

The post Exploring Isotype Charts: “Only An Ocean Between” (LESSONS OF ISOTYPE — PART 1) appeared first on Nightingale.

The story of the Soviet Union is indelibly wedded to its propaganda. Visually stunning and surprisingly direct, Soviet propaganda not only communicated to the Russian people, but it also came to define them as well. Information designers, artists, and communications officers designed images that inspired (or terrified) the Soviet people to commit to action.

As the totalitarian rule of the Communist party spread across the country, the Communists explained their ideas via successive campaigns of visually dazzling propaganda, often in the form of posters. While many of these designs have been studied, the Soviets also employed data visualizations that remain less well known.

These data-rich posters are fascinating artifacts of design and Russian history. But in order to understand them, it’s important to step back and quickly explore the Revolution of 1917, Russian collectivization, and a group of avant-garde artists called the Constructivists.

As the 20th century began, Russia was divided into three groups: the czars, who held a monopoly on political power, the intelligentsia, a group of highly educated citizens who were completely shut out of the government, and the peasants. This last group was almost completely rural, made up roughly 80% of the entire population, and had increasingly refused to acknowledge the rule of law or principle of private property.

To radically understate it, the Revolution of 1917 changed all that. A fraction of the intelligentsia known as the Bolsheviks overthrew and killed Czar Nicholas II and his family. The leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, outflanked all political opponents and forced the country into complete Communist rule. The message of Communism, however, still had to be sold to the general populace.

Before the 1917 revolution, the Constructivists were loosely affiliated with other modernist art movements in Western Europe. They sought to develop a new visual language based on reducing decoration and streamlining shape and type in order to “construct” art. But after the revolution, they found themselves at the center of the Russian cultural overhaul.

Since many of the Constructivists were also Communists, they eagerly participated in the cultural transformation that played out on an unprecedented scale. The resources at their control were profound, and many of the Constructivists were installed as leaders in the art academies or put in charge of media or industrial design institutions.

Many Constructivists rejected painting in favor of graphic design and photography. Some, like Alexander Rodchenko (pictured above), turned to political propaganda. It was a successful pairing at first, as the visual sophistication of the Constructivists amplified the Communists’ reach and influence. Since the country needed nearly everything produced in Russia to be remade in the new image of Communism, the Constructivists had an opportunity to play a large role in creating that image.

The first five-year plan (1928–1932)

The posters in this story come from the Woodburn Collection, at the National Library of Scotland, and focus mostly on the economic and social issues from the first two of Russia’s five-year plans, to make an appeal to the proletariat. The scope of this poster series was representative of the massive change occurring in the country.

As the political structure of Russia was rewritten, so was its national identity. The Bolsheviks evolved into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and the Communist Party shifted its focus to transforming the country into an economic powerhouse. This coincided with the transfer of power to Joseph Stalin, who announced the first five-year plan — a device the government used for planning economic growth — on October 1, 1928.

Many of the posters had a specific focus, such as agriculture, health care, chemical manufacturing, transportation, and residential development. These posters employ a Constructivist design aesthetic shot through with a proletariat focus. The designs superimpose simple charts directly onto photomontages that represent the subject matter of the data: tractors march in order, a biplane launches an airstrike against vermin, impeccably clean nurses tend to comrades in need.

Stalin used the first five-year plan to effectively weaponize Russian culture. Facets of the economic growth were dubbed “fronts” or “campaigns,” and workers were even organized into “shock troops.” A popular military metaphor emerged from the economic success of the first five-year plan: “There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm.”

In each poster, the charts plot the economic output before the five-year plan against the final projection after the plan. The charts aren’t just dropped into the designs, but rather are integrated into the overall composition. Area and bar charts are used as design elements to graphically add to the modernist compositions. Since the data visualizations are integrated into the overall composition, the data is fused to the message of transformation and militarized progress through quotas and measurement.

The data contained in these posters visualizes and celebrates Stalin’s future outcomes. When the first five-year plan started the USSR was fifth in the world in industrialization, and when it ended, it was second only to the United States. Former peasants under the old system were now collective farmers and comrades with the factory worker. Millions were housed in massive modernist housing estates. Like all propaganda, the language in these posters presumes success and presents the state as being successful, regardless of the truth.

Other designs focus on the overall plan. The poster below compares the level of investment in government and collective interests to investment in privately held interests. The pie charts below become Constructivist elements that divide the composition into diagonal rays illuminating and reinforcing the collective industrialization symbology. Investment is equated to toiling farmworkers, train bridges that span as far as the eye can see, and massive factories belching the industrial smoke of progress.

Ultimately, the Constructivists were leftist artists and did not socially integrate with the conservative Communists. Stalin hated the intelligentsia and forced the arts to embrace the Socialist Realism aesthetic. He removed the Constructivists from their positions of power, sometimes expelling them from the country, transferring them to inconsequential positions in the government, or in the worst cases—like Gustav Klutsis, who designed the first poster in this article — simply murdered them.

The second five-year plan (1933–1937)

The first five-year plan was an incredible success in transforming the USSR into an economic powerhouse, but Stalin was far from satiated. A second plan was immediately drawn up with a focus on heavy industry, coal production, communications, and the railways. The collectivization that was transforming Soviet culture increased and the focus on economically triumphing over the U.S. and Western Europe became a theme.

While the date of the poster above is undetermined, it is likely from the beginning of the second five-year plan. It focuses on the consolidation of the workforce into a homogenous proletariat where labor-power is prized over all else. The text from the middle section proclaims: “The work on agricultural rationalization has wide involvement of workers and peasant masses as a main and decisive prerequisite. Only with the decisive struggle with non-productive expenditures, negligence, and carelessness of work, a sloppy and careless attitude to the means of production, and behind the times’ technologies can working people have a final victory.”

With this plan, Stalin stripped all “non-productive” extravagance from Russian society. By introducing childcare, mothers were encouraged to work instead of caring for the family. Churches were closed and the clergy was eliminated by 1936.

This poster also shows the evolution in design style from the angular Constructivist sensibility toward the Socialist Realist aesthetic. While the massive figures — meant to show the journey from repressed peasant to triumphant factory worker — are drawn in the new, realist style, the background continues the diagonal slashes of the previous movement. The type is still set in bold, geometric fonts, and colors are flat and used graphically. Despite the Socialist Realism intentions, the foundations of Constructivism remain evident.

The same trace elements of Constructivism can be seen in the poster “Who Will Win? Overtake Industrialized Capitalism.” This poster illustrates a popular analogy by Lenin. Two speeding trains emblazoned with a swastika (representing Germany) and a star (representing either the U.S.A. or potentially even the Soviets) race toward the future. The brushy, abstracted forms of the trains streak upwards and to the right, echoing the line charts below. In a slash that bisects the composition is the direct quote from Lenin: “We either die, or we catch up with and get ahead of the most advanced capitalist countries.”

The line charts in the poster show the “production growth rate over the past five years by USSR and capitalist countries.” These charts project, unrealistically, how far ahead the Soviet Union would be if quotas were met. Of course, the Nazis had other plans. But Stalin’s investments in infrastructure and industrial development not only prepared the Soviet Union to repel the Nazis’ attempted invasion but ultimately helped them crush Hitler in Berlin four years later.

The Soviet Union created 13 five-year plans in all, extending right up to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. In a world of Soviet bureaucracy, fulfilling the current plan became the de facto mission. While data visualizations were used to explain many of the five-year plans, exploring the seventh plan helps us to understand how their designs continued to evolve.

The seventh five-year plan (1959–1965)

Nikita Khrushchev launched the seventh five-year plan in 1961, with the slogan “Catch up and overtake the USA by 1970.” As you can see below, data visualizations were still integral to the Soviet effort to spread the message.

By this point, the message was no longer focused on collectivization but on increasing the impact of industrial materials and development. The image demonstrates how increased production of electricity would impact various industrial sectors. The text in the lower left-hand corner says, “In 1980, the USSR will produce 1.5 times more electricity than all other countries in the world [currently do] in 1961.”

The complex nature of these works sought to use data to persuade the populace to believe in the Communist party. The story of the Soviet Union can’t be told by these design works alone, but many of the nuanced and tragic stories from this fascinating period are told in their creation. Perhaps more study will be focused on comparing the data as it’s presented against the historical data so that we might understand which aspects were indeed data-driven and which were simply propagandist messaging.

Thanks to Stephanie Tuerk, for introducing me to this work by presenting many of these images in a series of posts on the Data Visualization Society Slack channel, and thanks to our friends in the #historic-viz channel who expanded and elaborated on her initial post. Stephanie also helped with vital edits and additional insight for this article.

Major thanks to Andrey Lukyanenko and Polina Butrina not only for helping me translate these works but also for helping me understand their historic context. Thanks also to Alyssa Bell, Elijah Meeks, Duncan Geere, Jen Ray, and Noëlle Rakotondravony for the additional editing and support!

To view more of these amazing resources, check out the National Library of Scotland Woodburn Collection and the Russian Posters Collection in the Duke University Library Digital Repository.

Postscript

Earlier in 2021 the Merrill C. Berman Collection published an online exhibition and supporting text about some of the works in this essay plus additional dataviz propaganda from before and after. It is a substantial advancement in the research on this work and very much worth your time.

https://mcbcollection.com/visualization-of-data-in-the-soviet-union

The post Data Visualization in the Age of Communism appeared first on Nightingale.

It gets even more interesting —shortly after graduating with honors from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Sweeden, Hilma af Klint rejected her formal training in favor of Spiritualism and joined Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society in 1889. There she met four other like-minded women and founded “The Five” in 1896. The group held spiritual séances, regularly communicating with spirits, taking detailed notes and practiced automatic drawing.

Then in 1904, after eight years of esoteric training with “The Five”, Hilma af Klint was instructed by the spirit world to carry out a major assignment: a series of works called the “Paintings for the Temple.” This ambitious vision from beyond was to be a series of paintings installed in a specially designed spiral temple that would facilitate spiritual meditation on the transcendent reality beyond the physical world. This astral plane commission would occupy af Klint for the next nine years.

For the rest of her life, af Klint’s metaphysical research would continue, often extending into semi-scientific visual research, but she never truly exhibited or shared her work with the world. She led a quiet life, largely spent inwardly focused on her mediumistic artwork. When she died in 1944, she left a huge archive of 1,300 paintings and 125 notebooks to her nephew Erik af Klint, a naval officer. She left a note that explicitly stated that her work could not be exhibited until 20 years after her death and that the collection could never be split up.

Now, 74 years after her death, the Guggenheim Museum hosts “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” now on view in NYC until April 23rd, 2019. The first major exhibition of her work in the United States, it’s being hailed as one of the most globally important exhibitions of the decade with preeminent critics lining up to heap praise on af Klint’s fascinating story and newfound place in art history.

Abstraction vs Visualization

My interest in af Klint’s work is to explore her relation to scientific visualization. Many voices in the art world are claiming that af Klint’s works represent the “first” abstract paintings, but I think they are jumping to the wrong conclusion. I think her motivation was actually to visualize spiritual concepts. They see this as presaging abstract expressionism when really it’s part of a movement toward diagramming the immaterial world. The two concepts are very different.

Abstraction in the visual arts is the practice of focusing on the elements of the work of art itself. We see this in Kandinsky’s focus on color and line as a means to themselves, Mondrian’s gridded compositions, Picasso’s fracturing of the picture plane, and Pollack’s dripping paint. The elements that comprise a painting are the focus of the work, aesthetics the outcome. In 1911, Kandinsky himself refers to the work “Composition IV” as “The relation of the light, delicate and cold to the sharp movement (war) makes the main contrast in the picture.”

Of course, abstraction (or formalism) isn’t meaningless either. We know each of the artists above folded additional layers of meaning into their work: Kandinsky’s synesthetic conversion of music, Mondrian’s graphic analogies to the city, Picasso’s inspiration from the invention of the X-ray, and Pollack’s interest in the mandala.

Visualization, on the other hand, is entirely different.

The 19th century was filled with invention. Not only was the term visualization invented in 1883, but various types of visualization shaped how the sciences were presented to the world. Mendeleev’s invention of the periodic table in 1869 was represented in the form of a chart. Tales of mechanical innovation were initially spread by illustration, then by black and white photographs.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘visualization’ as “depicting the formation of mental images of things not actually present in sight.” In Orit Halpern’s great book “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” he elaborates:

“Visualization slowly mutated from the description of human psychological processes to the larger terrain of rendering practices by machines, scientific instrumentation, and numeric measures. Most important, visualization came to define bringing that which is not already present into sight… Visualizations are about making the inhuman, that which is beyond or outside sensory recognition, relatable to the human being.”

Scientific Illustration and Theosophical Visualization

Seeing as the Theosophical Society was an organization formed to advance the “study and elucidation of Occultism” and “encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science.” It only makes sense that the Spiritualists would incorporate the language of scientific visualization when transcribing the astral plane. Curator Iris Müller-Westermann explains: “You have to understand this was the age when natural sciences went beyond the visible: Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves [in 1886], Wilhelm Röntgen invented the x-ray [in 1895].”

One of the best examples of this study can be found in Edwin D. Babbitt, whose 1878 book “The Principles of Light and Color: The Harmonic Laws Of The Universe, The Etherio-Atomic Philosophy Of Force, Chromo Chemistry, Chromo Therapeutics, And The General Philosophy Of The Fine Forces, Together With Numerous Discoveries And Practical Applications.” With a title like that, it’s no wonder Klint was a fan.

Babbitt’s first chapter “Harmonic Laws of the Universe”, is essentially a spiritualist translation of scientific theory that spans biology, physics, sociology, and architecture. Each discipline is described using largely artistic terms such as light, shade, and hue and contextualized with similar-looking examples. “Unity” is seen in the forms of snowflakes, microsomes, and geometric diagrams. “Gradiation or Progression” “may be seen in the forms of many grasses, leaves, flowers, shells, streams, etc. is called the line of grace, named also by Hogarth, and is a spiral. It is seen in the climbing of vines as they encircle a tree, in many seashells.”

The Theosophical exploration of scientific illustration quickly became entangled with astral visualization. The first photographs of snowflakes became indirect evidence of sublime symmetry. The diagrammed veins of a leaf used to underscore the profundity of divine computation.

af Klint was born into an educated home; her father was a military officer, her two brothers were scientists and she held a life-long interest in Botany. “The Harmonic Laws of the Universe” clearly had an important influence on af Klint, its changing focus from macro to micro evident in many of Klint’s paintings. We see a botanical line in af Klint’s paintings that represent “a parallel world with unities within unities.” Flowers become dimensions become cells become natural forces at play on human consciousness.

Another book that clearly had an influence on af Klint was “Thought-Forms” by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater. It begins “As knowledge increases, the attitude of science towards the things of the invisible world is undergoing considerable modification. Its attention is no longer directed solely to the earth with all its variety of objects, or to the physical worlds around it; but it finds itself compelled to glance further afield, and to construct hypotheses as to the nature of the matter and force which lie in the regions beyond the ken of its instruments.”

Published in 1901 by the Theosophical Society, “Thought-Forms” is an exploration of how multiple forms of thought are transmuted into various spiritual planes. It covers subjects like ‘How the Vibration Acts’, ‘The Meaning of Colours’, and ‘Illustrative Thought-Forms.’ This last section takes up the majority of the book and pairs abstract watercolor paintings with their thought correlations.

For example: “In the Six Directions. — The form represented in Fig. 39 is the result of another endeavor to extend love and sympathy in all directions — an effort almost precisely similar to that which gave birth to [sympathy and Love for all]. The reasons for this variety and for the curious shape taken in this case constitute a very interesting illustration of the way in which thought-forms grow.”

Undoubtedly af Klint was deeply enmeshed in these theories. Her paintings combine so many aspects of scientific illustration, geometry, color theory, and linguistics with a Theosophical appreciation for organic forms. Yet her paintings were not just a combination of these elements.

af Klint was inspired to craft her own highly nuanced, totally unique visualizations of the astral world. Her use of color and form were not a means to themselves, her compositions were representations of abstract concepts. Each color, each shape, the arrangement in the composition are not abstractions, but visual descriptions of ethereal concepts outside of human sensory recognition.

While af Klint was using the language of abstraction before the modernists, her paintings are not abstract — they are representations of the extended scientific and Theosophical concepts she was immersed in. af Klint dedicated her life to transmuting the spiritual realm into art for meditative study. Her paintings were not (and still are not) for sale and they were not made to fit into a marketplace.

Challenging historical concepts

For being roughly a century old, Hilma af Klint’s work feels surprisingly new. Ben Davis writing in Artnet elaborates, “Now happens to be a very exciting moment in art history, with loads of new scholarship disrupting the old Paris-to-New York, Modern-to-contemporary throughline, reconsidering the stories of minorities and the colonized, “outsiders” of all kinds, and also of women.”

Georg Imdahl, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster in Germany and an art critic for the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, is more hesitant on the matter, clearly highlighting the disruption to the cannon. “She developed somehow outside the art scene of the time, so I think we need to learn more about her intentions as an artist… That said, there are several of her works which I would consider integrating into a discussion of the genesis of 20th-century abstraction.”

I’ll conclude with the preeminent art critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times. She eloquently explains why this work is finding such profound resonance with a global art audience today:

“Her century-old paintings come to us relatively unencumbered by critical or historical baggage. Their spare planes of color and stylistic diversity tie them to the present, underscoring how many painters, especially women, are reinvigorating abstraction by making it flexible and worldly. However af Klint’s achievement alters the past, it belongs to us. Its history begins now.”

There is much more to read about af Klint’s work online. Here’s a selection of great articles, starting with her official history at the Hilma af Klint Foundation.

About Hilma af Klint –

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) made her international debut with the exhibition The Spiritual in Art – Abstract Paintings…

www.hilmaafklint.se

Why Hilma af Klint’s Occult Spirituality Makes Her the Perfect Artist for Our Technologically…

I can’t help but agree with all the praise being heaped on the Guggenheim’s big Hilma af Klint show. It’s great, great…

news.artnet.com

Hilma af Klint: a painter possessed

Was Hilma af Klint Europe’s first abstract artist? As an exhibition of her extraordinary, occult-inspired works opens…

www.theguardian.com

‘Hilma Who?’ No More

Critic’s Pick Spiritual sparks helped inspire the radical and visionary art of Hilma af Klint, the new (old) name to…

www.nytimes.com

Hilma af Klint’s Visionary Paintings

One work amid the hundreds in a flabbergasting retrospective, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” at the…

www.newyorker.com

Thanks a ton to Tyler Curtis and Elijah Meeks for the copy edits!

The post Hilma af Klint: Visualizing the Spirit World appeared first on Nightingale.

While Du Bois’s legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualization remains relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’s story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Understanding the sequence of the charts

There are sixty-three of Du Bois’s charts from “The Exhibit of American Negroes” in the collection of the Library of Congress and there are a number of reasons why understanding the sequence of the charts is important. If we learn the order that each chart was created, it would help us to understand why Du Bois developed the unique forms and methods that underlie the entire series. Then, by considering the order in which Du Bois displayed these works to the viewer, we can understand how he communicated his complex data story.

Even with the publishing of the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” which seeks to tell the story of the exhibit and briefly touches on the individual charts, this body of work remains under-researched. Since there is little historical documentation, not much is known about how the charts were created and the exact sequence of the charts will probably never be known.

We know that the charts were created in less than four months, and we know that after the Paris Exposition, the exhibit was displayed in Buffalo, NY, and Charleston, SC. Since the exhibit was created in collaboration with Daniel Murray, assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, Du Bois had known the works would eventually be part of their collection. In my correspondence with the Library of Congress (LoC), they assumed that the order of the charts was likely established by Murray himself, which does lend the sequence quite a bit of credence.

As I’ve written in previous posts, Du Bois set off on a 10-year study of “The Negro Problem” which began with the publishing of “The Philadelphia Negro” in 1899. Encouraged by the positive reaction, he immediately continued his research in both Virginia and Georgia.

Du Bois was already planning to craft a high-level overview as part of his larger body of research. So when “The Exhibit of American Negroes” was organized at the end of 1899, Du Bois naturally took the opportunity to use the exposition to expand the scope of his sociological work. As a result, he then organized the statistical charts to explore data on three levels: international, national, and local.

The charts themselves are split into two groups: “The Georgia Negro” which focuses on the “typical” state of Georgia, which had the second-largest African-American population at the time (Virginia was the largest), and the highest Negro to White ratio. It contains charts #1–36.

The other section is called “A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America”, which focuses on the national and international view of the data. It contains charts #37–63.

Doubts about the sequence of the charts

As discussed in my last article, the chart “Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta GA, USA,” which is #31 in the LoC sequence, is actually displayed on the top of a stack of the charts and acts as a “key” to the larger exhibition. It is shown in conjunction with the two “title” charts for each series – but I’ve always thought it was odd that the 31st work in the series was shown as the key to understanding the rest of the works.

Another aspect of the sequence that has perplexed me is how the works are titled. For most of the second series, the titles are printed and pasted onto the card while the first series labels are all hand-lettered. This is important because it suggests that the second series would have been done first in order to get the titles confirmed in time for the printing. Of course, on further examination of the second series, that’s not entirely true as 8 of the 27 works are hand-titled. Then, if we consider the time it took to conduct the research for “The Georgia Negro” and then hand-draw the thirty-five 24″ x 27″ charts in that series, it seems likely that this group of charts would have to be crafted after the other series.

I propose that the two series were actually created in the opposite order. I believe Du Bois and his students crafted the second series while the research was being conducted for The Georgia Negro. Then, after both series were created, Du Bois added additional hand-titled works to the second series in an effort to complete the storyline in both series. I believe the “key chart” (“Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta GA, USA”) was actually among the last of the charts created, as it seems to situate the statistical charts to the larger exhibit.

Below is an image of all the charts in the two sequences. Looking at the entire sequence in this way shows how visually different the two series are, and also displays how innovative the charts are across both series.

The mystery of William Andrew Rogers

Yet another mystery is the relationship between the creation of the work and a graduate student named William Andrew Rogers.

Listed on the official Atlanta University record (above) as a non-resident graduate student residing in Virginia, Rogers was first rediscovered by Shawn Michelle Smith in her amazing book Photography on the Color Line. In an article from the Atlanta Journal from 1900, Rogers is cited as “drawing and coloring” all the charts, but the documentation for the newspaper article has been elusive and my continued attempts to learn more about Rogers have been fruitless.

While it certainly makes sense that a single student oversaw the organization and drafting of the charts, there is not currently any footprint of Rogers’ work (or identity) outside of this mention. While the credit on each chart is listed as “Done by Atlanta University”, and the charts are understood to be created in collaboration with his students, I think Du Bois’s lifetime of innovation and thought leadership justifies him to be the author of this series of charts.

Discovering a previously unknown chart

As you can tell, I’ve been interested in the sequence of the charts since the beginning of my research. As I looked for clues about their sequence, I returned to the original exposition photograph to get an understanding of what the team prioritized as important.

What I found was shocking.

While the two “cover” charts are on display, as well as “Taxpayer Property of Negroes in Three United States”, I realized that the top-right chart was not part of the original Library of Congress collection.

From here I enlarged the image and played with the contrast levels to try to learn more about the chart.

I could see it was indeed a unique new piece that had not been studied before but the resolution was not high enough to understand it. So I emailed the librarians at the Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and much to my delight, they responded with a high-res image in just a few hours. I was then able to zoom in on the missing chart. Much to my surprise, the entire work was now legible:

This previously unknown work was hidden in plain sight.

“The Decrease of Illiteracy Among the Black Freedmen of the United States” is a lost work now understood to be part of the second series. The quality of the image is high enough to decipher the text, and for the purpose of this article, I was also able to re-color the work based on the corresponding grey scales in the image.

The chart shows the 36% percent drop in the illiteracy of Freedmen over a 30-year period. The steady decrease statistically proves the voracious appetite for education among African-Americans and defies the racist stereotype of the typical American Negro as an ignorant slave. The newly discovered chart creates a correlation between freedom and education. This chart shows just how systematic Du Bois was in crafting his message and reinforcing it throughout the entire series of statistical charts.

The newly discovered chart acts as a missing link between the 3 views of data for both Illiteracy and the proportion of Freedmen.

Lastly, a footnote on color before moving on.

Since Du Bois employed a limited palette, the grey scale in the photograph could only suggest certain color combinations. Since we know that the newly discovered chart was on display in the exhibit, we know it was meant to be a strong visual. The options below display a few of the possibilities, but I think the green/black combo creates a clear relationship to the other charts in the series.

Systems Thinking in the “Exhibit of American Negroes”

While the discovery of this chart is extremely exciting, it underscores the importance of storytelling in this series of statistical charts. Exploring the relationships between the charts and the cumulative effect of knowledge building that results is ultimately an endeavor to understand how Du Bois considered the persuasive impact of his work.

In November of 1900, Du Bois wrote “The American Negro at Paris” as a report on the exhibition as well as a summary of the events in Paris. In it, he states: “The history of the Negro is illustrated by charts and photographs; there is, for instance, a series of striking models of the progress of the colored people, beginning with the homeless freedman and ending with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. There are charts of the increase of Negro population, the routes of the African slave trade, the progress of emancipation, and the decreasing illiteracy…”

The relationship between freedom to education was one of the most important stories for Du Bois. It’s even more striking that one of the main charts focusing on illiteracy is missing from our historical understanding of his work. By discovering this chart, we gain further insight as to how Du Bois sought to change the perception of African-Americans in Western society.

A lot more work to do: some thoughts on my research

It’s been a remarkable journey. When I began back in March, I thought it would be a fun exercise to learn more about these charts. I was hungry to learn more and couldn’t find anything substantial about them at the time. As I began writing the first article I realized there was so much to be discussed that I expanded my focus to a series of four articles. In the second article, I learned more about the background of the exhibit and began to correspond with several Du Bois scholars, including Eugene F. Provenzo and Silas Munro (one of the authors of the new book). With their encouragement — and a lot of support from the community — I continued to explore Du Bois’s work and eventually was granted a visit to the Library of Congress. I still had more to learn, so the series expanded again to six articles.

There are still many unanswered questions about Du Bois’s data visualizations: Why did they draw the maps in the first series? How are Du Bois’s themes manifested across the entire series? Are more charts missing from the Library of Congress? What role did William Andrew Rogers play and did he create other data visualizations? How was this work received in the exhibits in Buffalo, NY, and Charleston, SC?

Now, at the end (?) of my research, I’m proud to think that I’ve made some contributions to the understanding of Du Bois’s data visualizations. With the release of the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” and with my own work, there is a great deal of new excitement about this previously less-considered work. By exploring Du Bois’s work at the Paris Exposition, a new generation of historians can leverage Du Bois’s charts in the study of African-Americans in US history. By understanding Du Bois’s sociological methods, we gain inspiration in using data to fight prejudice in today’s world.

There are strong indicators that Du Bois’s work will finally be written into the history of data visualization as well. Several leading voices in the data visualization community, like Mona Chalabi, RJ Andrews, and Bill Shander regularly refer to Du Bois’s achievements with hopes that others will follow. While Du Bois’s impact on statistical chart-making may have been overlooked, perhaps his story and ideas can at least be shared within the timeline.

Our understanding of history is changing

We find our global culture at a critical nexus; caught between an embattled version of history that was crafted by the consensus of few, and a more nuanced version of history discussed by many. What began with the crowd-sourcing of knowledge in Wikipedia, now compels us to challenge historical accounts in search of a more diverse approach.

Notable personages are emerging in many disciplines, upending our conventional understanding of timelines and movements. Hilma af Klint’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is radically challenging the previous understanding of modernism. The publishing of the little-known book “Color Problems” by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in 1901 challenges the terminology and methods for evaluating color relationships. The history of computing now references Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton while Katherine Johnson’s contribution to space exploration was turned into a major motion picture in “Hidden Figures.”

The history of data visualization is also far from complete. The amazing book “The Minard System” by Sandra Rendgen presents the collected works of Charles-Joseph Minard, but where is the detailed research on Florence Nightingale? Manual Lima’s remarkable Book of Trees and Book of Circles uncover a wealth of historical visualizations, but who is examining the individual works for their systems and techniques? By exploring the data visualizations of the past, we gain inspiration on how to create new forms of visual communication in the present and future.

I’ll end this series as I did in my presentation at the Tapestry Conference a few weeks ago. I’ve discovered so much on my journey this year. The opportunity to explore the unexplored history of data visualization is manifest. Interest in historic data visualization is growing, our community is supportive, and the global conversation on what is data and how to understand it is a cultural imperative.

So I ask you. What other stories are out there to be found and re-told?

Thank you, thank you, thank you

In each article, I thank the people who have helped me edit and discuss this work — but since this is the last of the series, it’s important to say a few more words to say just how important they have been in encouraging me.

My colleagues at McKinsey’s People Analytics and Measurements team: Rebecca Anderson, Tyler Curtis, Rachel Ramsay, and Lauren Rebagliati for their amazing attention to detail, persistence, and support across 6 articles and 22,000 words

To Bhavna Devani who inspired me to really dig in and explore this work. Who counseled me on writing on race-related issues at the beginning and continued to support and champion me along the way.

To RJ Andrews, Elijah Meeks, and Martin Telefont who always write me back on Twitter and continue to inspire me with their amazing work day after day.

To the Du Bois scholar Eugene F. Provenzo and Silas Munro, who wrote about the charts in the recent “Data Portraits” book, for answering loads of Du Bois questions and sharing their passion and curiosity with me.

To my wife, Jen Ray, for entertaining my endless conversations about 19th-century history and reading each of these long articles a bunch of times.

I also want to send my heartfelt gratitude to the data visualization community which has been so encouraging, especially those attending the Tapestry Conference. I feel like I found my “tribe” this year and I endeavor to contribute to the discussion of our work. It’s gonna be fun!

*Lastly, thanks to Peter Dalgaard for some French corrections on the new image above!

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Discovering an Unknown Chart from W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Exhibition of American Negroes” (Part 6) appeared first on Nightingale.

Activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois created “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris in collaboration with Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Calloway, the assistant librarian at the Library of Congress Daniel Murray, and students from historically black college Atlanta University.

While Du Bois’ legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’ story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Viewing an original Du Bois hand-drawn chart

This research project has been a rich and surprising journey. It began with the discovery of the exhibition, exploring the historic details of each chart, then meeting other researchers and designers who have also found passion in exploring this work.

Along the way, I learned that the original works were too fragile to view. As my research intensified, so did my questions, and I found myself in contact with the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. After six weeks of correspondence with the LoC librarians, I was permitted a very special exception to view only one of the Du Bois original charts in person. I chose a chart I had never researched before, a chart that stands out from all the others and acts in many ways as a sort of key to the entire series in the exhibition.

As you can tell, this image is different from the rest of the 60-ish charts for a few reasons. It is one of only five horizontal formatted charts and the only one that uses mixed media including pasted photographs and gold leaf. It is the only chart to have been colored using some sort of crayon, so it has a different color scheme than the rest of the works. But most importantly, Du Bois uses this chart to explain — and personify — his population.

Part of the “Georgia Negro” series, the chart displays the demographic information for the Negro population of Georgia and outlines the economic groups by income from “poor” ($100 — $300 a month) to the “well-to-do” ($1000 and over).

The top row features a snapshot of a “well-to-do” family across the top of the chart. Each section — rent, food, clothing, taxes, and savings — is mapped to a color, which then flows down to each stacked bar as they run down the page. This brilliantly illustrates the percentage of each group’s monthly spending. The color of each category in the legend ranges from black (rent) to clear (savings) showing the impact on each of the income groups.

This chart is one of the most complex in the series and is filled with details such as the scientific description of the average diet (split by animal and vegetable), photographic examples of the dress of a young man and woman, tax bracket descriptions, and even a gold-leafed illustration of a dollar coin. If the illustration of the eagle is a bit simplistic, the overall line work of the chart more than makes up for it with delicate arrows and curves that defy the crudeness of the tools used to draft them.

Another surprise was how large the chart was — 27″ x 22″. Du Bois and his team of students set out to draft this work knowing that it would be easier to standardize drawn elements that were larger and more easily measured. The large size of each chart was likely determined so they could be drafted with precision, as each line and object relate in size to the hand and pen. The drafting would, therefore, benefit from a gestural line (drawn with the arm) rather than a dexterous one (drawn from the hand) and be easier to read from a few feet away.

Another important aspect of this chart was its importance in the exhibition design. Only a few of the charts were framed — as most of the displayed works are photos of notable African-American leaders and displays from historically black colleges. Indeed most of the exhibition was dedicated to the roughly 500 photographs Du Bois and team had assembled to present the radically progressive representation of African-Americans that had never been seen on the world stage.

As David Levering Lewis outlines in the book A Small Nation of People, which focuses on the photographs in the exhibition: “[Du Bois] designed his exhibit to subvert conventional perceptions of the American Negro by presenting to the patronizing curiosity of white spectators a racial universe that was the mirror image of their own uncomprehending, oppressive white world… but the display offered much more, he explained. ‘ Beneath all this is a carefully thought-out plan.’ ”

Since the chart we’re discussing is more decorative and includes photos it acts as a bridge to the rest of the statistical charts. In fact, this work is not just the “key” to the entire series, it is also the first chart the exhibition audience would have interacted with, as it was the first chart on a stack of works — as visible in the original documentation:

Additionally, the bottom of the chart is clearly labeled, “For Further Statistics Raise This Frame”, so this chart was always planned to be the “first” of the statistical graphics.

I’ll argue that Du Bois is actually among the first designers to consider their visualizations to be “interactive”. Since the charts were crafted to be handled and they were sequenced to expose new layers of data in each subsequent work, Du Bois clearly intended for each work to be viewed within the construct of his study. Since most of the charts show similar types of data across international, national and state views. It’s likely that a jump from one chart to another was synonymous in Du Bois’ time to a “double-click” in ours.

The last insight I have to share was only possible because I had the opportunity to see the original document. As previously noted, the works are extremely fragile. Once the Library of Congress digitized the works, they placed them in a highly controlled environment and severely restricted the handling of these works to an absolute minimum. The works are literally crumbling.

At the left one can see a number of scratches on the surface of the chart. Since it was placed on the top of the stack in the exhibition, I think these scratches are from the actual fingernails of the patrons when they handled the boards. The indentations seen in the image are certainly the same size and curve of a fingernail. Discovering the visible evidence of the human touch from 19th-century hands was certainly exhilarating and reinforced the age of these amazing works.

Visually exciting and unusual charts by design

As we’ve been discussing throughout this series, the simplicity of these hand-made charts resonates so strongly with our modern aesthetics and preoccupation with data. Legendary designer Michael Bierut, on his podcast with Jessica Helfand, says of Du Bois’ work:

“A stunning revelation. I had no idea this work existed and I still can’t believe it exists.”

Let’s continue our look into some of Du Bois’ most unique and visually exciting charts in the series.

The above is a completely unique variation on the pie chart by Du Bois. The circle is split into six categories representing different types of occupations. Each slice of the pie is then divided to show the percentage of Negro to White workers for that occupation. The sections are separated by red lines and each white slice is slightly differentiated by thin lines radiating around the center.

By introducing direct comparisons inside each slice, Du Bois twists the conventional understanding of the pie chart. Traditionally, the pie chart equals 100% and its slices represent the proportions of the whole. In Du Bois’ version, the six slices represent 100% of 5 different categories, with the sixth representing the total of all five. While the logic seems complex, the ability to compare categories and relationships between Negro and White workers is actually quite easy to understand.

While much maligned today, the pie chart was very popular in the 19th century. Invented by William Playfair in 1802, the circular chart could be seen across European and American scientific work with regular innovations taking the form of sunbursts, fan charts, and other types of experiments which can be seen in the extraordinary “Book of Circles” by Manuel Lima.

While the design of the chart is unique, the draftsmanship is equally elegant. The crisp line work, circular graphic labels, thin red highlights, and subtle arrowheads all display a mastery of craft that begs to be compared to the fine arts. In fact, the chart above has a similar feeling to a Sol LeWitt artwork from 1973 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Du Bois likely regarded the radiating lines as a means to differentiate each category, but minimalist artists would explore the same graphic elements for their visual rhythm and spiritual connotations sixty years later.

One of the more complex-looking charts in the exhibit, the above is actually quite easy to read. It displays the marital status of men and women from birth to 65+. A central axis runs down the center of the page, with the data for men and women spreading out from the center into three types: Single (blue), Married (red), and Widowed (green).

This is another chart where we can see Du Bois the sociologist at work. In his landmark book “The Philadelphia Negro” from the previous year (1899), Du Bois describes the same type of data, providing some interesting context for the chart above:

“…the number of married women, too, is small, while the large number of widowed and separated indicates widespread and early breaking up of family life. The number of single women is probably lessened by unfortunate girls, and increased somewhat by deserted wives who report themselves as single…

The lax moral habits of the slave regime still show themselves in a large amount of cohabitation without marriage. In the slum districts, there are many such families, which remain together years and are in effect common law marriages. Some of these connections are broken by whim or desire, although in many cases they are permanent unions.”

Interestingly enough, one of the few existing sources of statistical data pertaining to the African-American population that Du Bois references in “The Philadelphia Negro” is the “Statistical Atlas of the United States” by Henry Gannett of the United States Geological Survey. A master of the statistical chart, Gannett features a chart on the conjugal condition by age in the 1890 version of his Statistical Atlas. Since Du Bois clearly respected Gannett’s work, and because he knew other scientifically minded Europeans would also know Gannett’s work, it makes sense that he crafted a similar version using a known method of visualization for his own demographic.

The above chart is another original Du Bois design, this one slightly more enigmatic. At first, I thought it might be a sort of Marimekko Chart, but I realized this chart has no scale and only shows relationships between the categories by proportional areas.

Each of the rectangles in the chart represents the estimated capital of Negro Businessmen in the United States based on total capital of $8,784,637. Since there are no numbers on each shape, this chart is designed only to show simple comparisons. Negro-owned Grocers and General Merchants are the largest types of businesses by far and the smallest are Negro-owned Banks and Building and Loan Associations, both colored bright red for emphasis.

Du Bois was especially interested in studying African-American businesses at this time in his life. Less than a year before the Paris exposition, Du Bois hosted the Fourth Atlanta University Conference on the subject of “The Negro In Business” — the first time the subject had been systematically studied in the United States. As Eugene F. Provenzo outlines in his great book on the exhibition, Du Bois “sent ‘schedules’ of questions to approximately fifty co-researchers to administer in local communities across the south… Du Bois wanted to know different types of business ventures that Blacks undertook, ‘the order of their appearance, their measure of success and the capital invested in them.”

A total of 200 businessmen sent in detailed accounts, some of which are included in the exhibition. One of them was Mr. C.C. Dodson of Knoxville, Tennessee who described his experience: “With close attention to business, by observing frugality, and by manifesting a disposition to please my patrons with courteous treatment and efficient work I have succeeded so my critics say ‘well’… As regards to the second question, it is rather difficult to tell how a white man really regards a Negro, especially when there is something to be gained to the former from the latter. A white man has a remarkable power of self concealment. Those whom I deal treat me well. Those whom I do not deal with do not molest me. I don’t know how they regard me.”

What’s important to remember is that across the charts, as well as the collected photographs, records and documentation, Du Bois continues to build and cross-reference the story of an emerging people.

This chart represents just how few African-Americans were actually classified as ‘Almshouse Paupers’. Almshouses were tax-supported residences where people were required to go if they could not support themselves — a sort of catch-all “poorhouse” which might also include a number of elderly, children, and the “feeble-minded”.

By focusing on this demographic Du Bois seeks to usurp racist assumptions. The 2-part chart novelly shows the proportion of 88 Negro paupers (the tiny red section) to every 100,000 Negros ( the huge brown area)— only .09 % of the total population. Then, at the bottom of the page, he breaks that population numbers into two semi-equal areas representing gender.

While Du Bois presents data that rejects European presumptions, it is likely he was reporting the official numbers of African-Americans in state-owned institutions. This doesn’t tell the whole story. Many African-Americans, including the lowest socioeconomic groups, rejected the systems created by White society and found support from their own community.

Iris Carlton-Laney, in her fantastic 1989 paper, explores 19th-century “Old-houses” and outlines the problem: “…Black social welfare was not a priority particularly in the South where segregated institutions were prevalent. As Blacks observed and experienced such racial injustices, the need to develop their own social services was reinforced.”

Most African-Americans were supported by Black churches, women’s organizations, secret orders, and fraternities. Carlton-Laney continues: “Next to Black churches, the secret societies had the longest history of any voluntary organizations… These organizations which were secret in procedure yet benevolent in purpose, offered opportunities for Black men and women to manage their own affairs and to rise to leadership positions-opportunities not afforded them in the larger society…. Blacks, motivated by the fear of almshouses and pauper burials, nonetheless, made financial familial sacrifices to join ‘beneficial societies.’ Membership in these societies offered some measure of psychological peace and satisfaction.”

This work is a unique piece in the series as it doesn’t communicate any statistical data beyond the written information. It belonged to the second set of charts in the series focusing on data on a national level and is depicted by a rectangle split diagonally into four parts showing the value of taxpayer property in three states plus the total value of all three: $34,893,684.

This infographic was originally hung on the top left wall in the exhibit and likely served two purposes: first, to underscore the financial scale of African-Americans in terms of millions of US dollars, and second, to give that value some visual weight in the booth.

To get some concept of the financial scale, if we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index, $34,000,000 in 1900 is equivalent in purchasing power to $992,152,380.95 in 2017. Reporting such a massive sum was designed to shake the racist assumptions of African-Americans as ‘Negro savages’. As historian and Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis says in his essay in A Small Nation Of People: “the representative Negroes — of the educated, the prosperous, the phenotypically advantaged — are cynosures of all the characteristics and virtues of which most whites, either in ignorance or from bigotry, believed most blacks to be devoid.”

A typical example can be seen in the satirical magazine Puck which published “Darkies’ Day at the Fair”. Shawn Michelle Smith examines this drawing in her book Photography on the Color Line: “Africans and African-Americans alike, despite the extreme distinction in nation, ethnicity, and culture, all become the same Sambo types — all of them have huge white lips of the American minstrelsy, and all of them are waiting for watermelon. The Puck cartoon demonstrates how the scientific “facts” of eugenicists and biological racialists and the racist caricatures of white supremacists mutually reinforced one another…”

Du Bois places this striking graphic to loom above the exhibit — a testament to the economic gains African-Americans were able to achieve in spite of systematic prejudice and economic repression.

A lifetime later in 1963, Ralph McGill, the anti-segregationist editor, and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, traveled to Ghana to meet Du Bois in person. He brilliantly captures the ethereal mood of his meeting with Du Bois shortly before his death; a frail expatriate, razor-sharp and angry.

“Until one met him he was myth grown out of some seventy-five years of the often turbulent and tragic history of the South’s and the nation’s trauma of race.” McGill recounts how Du Bois begins the conversation with a sobering story:

“…Walking to [the Atlanta Constitution’s] office, I passed by a grocery store that had on display out front the drying fingers of a recently lynched Negro.’

He fell silent. No one else said anything. Outside the windows of his spacious house, provided by the government, in the old residential section of Ghana, there was a sound of children at play. A breath of air blew in past the flowering shrubs near the windows.”

He was speaking of the brutal lynching of Sam Hose who was accused of killing his landlord and raping the landlord’s wife. Hose was mutilated by a group of about 500 people before being tied to a tree and burned alive. The mob then cut off pieces of his dead body as souvenirs and sent them to businesses across the state for public viewing. While walking to the Atlanta Constitution office to submit a statement about the increase of African-American lynchings, Du Bois actually chanced upon Hose’s knuckles displayed in a local Atlanta store.

The fact that this memory was so present in Du Bois mind at the end of his life underscores its importance as he begins to question his scientific research. He states in his 1968 Autobiography, “Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort I was doing…”

In the next article, I’ll discuss the legacy of Du Bois’ data visualizations and explore some reasons why they remain lesser known. Shortly thereafter I’ll publish the last piece in the series that outlines all the charts in order plus discusses an extremely exciting discovery that I’ve made. But again, no spoilers yet. This six-part series will cover:

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original W.E.B. Du Bois Data Visualization (Part 4) appeared first on Nightingale.

“The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris was created by activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, in collaboration with Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Calloway, the assistant librarian at the Library of Congress Daniel Murray, along with students from historically black college Atlanta University.

While Du Bois’ legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’ story and have beendiscussing it through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

This is article 3 of a 6-part series that covers many aspects of Du Bois’s exhibition, and links to all articles are at the end. Be sure to check out the last one – there’s a big reveal!

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Discovering How These Charts Were Made

As discussed in the previous chapter of this series, Du Bois began assembling the exhibit on December 28, 1899. The Paris Exposition began on Apr 15, 1900 and the travel would take at least 6 weeks by ship. Du Bois did not have very much time.

In his Autobiography (written at the age of 90) Du Bois briefly explains how he crafted the charts:

“I got a couple of my best students and put a series of facts into charts: the size and growth of the Negro American group; its division by age and sex; its distribution, education and occupations; its books and periodicals. We made a most interesting set of drawings, limned on pasteboard cards about a yard square and mounted on a number of moveable standards. The details of finishing these 50 or more charts, in colors, with accuracy, was terribly difficult with little money, limited time and not much encouragement.”

Beyond this quote, there is relatively little information about the creation of the actual charts but there are documents from the time that might help explain how this work was created.

The preface of “A Textbook on Ornamental Design” from 1901 instructs that it is “… [to] be used as a work of reference by the practical designer in the solution of the numerous problems that confront him in his everyday work.” Created for correspondence schools, this manual outlines many of the technical tricks of 19th-century draftsmanship for a general audience.

Illustrations from “A Textbook on Ornamental Design”, 1901, International Correspondence Schools

It begins with a description of how to build a sturdy drawing board, the basic use of a T-square, a drafting triangle, a compass, a divider (like a compass but with 2 steel points used for measuring distances) and then explicit directions on how to sharpen a pencil. The book then goes into inking, and as you can see from the illustration at the left, the hand lightly rests on a T-square which then guides the pen. The book is written in a style that provides basic explanation for the beginner but not a lot of actual instruction.

As we have already observed in Du Bois’ work, it is difficult to understand how expertly the charts are drafted using such rudimentary tools. The textbook helps us understand how Du Bois’ team drafts such perfect curvilinear lines when it covers what is now a near-lost-art: the use of the French Curve: “It is usually difficult to draw a smooth, continuous curve…by always fitting the curve to at least three points, and, when moving it to a new position, by setting it so that it will coincide with part of the line already drawn.”

The most exciting aspect of this particular book are the sections dedicated to hand-drawn lettering and its importance. “In fact, generally speaking, more time is required to make well-executed letters than to make well-executed drawings of objects. We earnestly request the student to practice lettering, and not to think that that part of the work is of no importance.” The manual gives some directions on several styles of letterforms, but I was shocked by the similarity of the style of block lettering to what we find in Du Bois’ work.

The careful drafting of the letterforms was likely developed into a strict set of measurements that thestudents penciled in with a ruler then fill in with ink.

Below we see details from two of Du Bois’ charts. Of all the works in the original lot, “Family Budgets” is actually a supplemental page of budget numbers that were part of “The Georgia Negro” series. For some reason, it is included twice: the first a partially damaged draft in pencil, and then the second, finished document in ink. Below you can see the same text from both documents:

The above shows both the block and ‘hairline’ text in pencil and ink. As you can see, Du Bois’ team must have set up a system to account for each letter’s measurements (x-height, cap-height, ascenders, etc) for both of the typeface styles in order to make the work more standardized and easier to draft for multiple students. Additionally, the team only used all-capital letters for all the charts and opted to remove any curves in the letterforms. As demonstrated in the “G” in “Budgets” above, each curve is reduced to a series of angles.

Considering Du Bois and his team were under such strict time constraints, luxuries like printing were clearly out of the question. The work would need to be hand painted watercolor on thick card stock, and it’s likely that Du Bois chose to use watercolors by George C. Osborne.

Based in Philadelphia — where Du Bois also lived until a year before he began this work — Osborne was one of the few 19th-century American makers of artists paint. Many artists of the time believed the especially vivid paint colors by Osborne were equal or better to any made in Europe.

The limited palette in the image above can be seen directly in Du Bois’ color choices; defining a spare, crisp and elegant style that relies heavily on saturated primary colors. I point this out specifically because Du Bois’ use of color likely figures into what is the biggest misconception about this body of work: that it was a precursor to modernism.

The (Understandable) Mistake of Modernism

While the data visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois are certainly under-recognized, they have been reported on over the past few years. Great articles have appeared in Hyperallergic, Brainpickings, The Public Domain Review, and on the Smithsonian’s blog. While the coverage of this work has been highly considered, I think the general representation of the work might not be entirely accurate.

In 2016 Allison Meier published a detailed article in Hyperallergic, where she understandably writes:

While Meier correctly elaborates on the idea by putting it into context in the 19th century,the sentence above set in motion a ripple echoed in many of the subsequent articles — that somehow Du Bois’ work could be connected to modernism. >While the promise of the statement is exciting, it is not very likely.

Statistical Chart Making in 1900

The rise of the sciences in the 19th centurywas palpable. Technological inventions (the steam engine, electric motor, light bulb, photograph, and telegraph) were regularly introduced. New theories in mathematics, physics, and medicine were popularized, and then the world was turned on its head by Charles Darwin. Each of these inventions was communicated and documented using some sort of visualization. What is the periodic table of elements if not a chart?

Michael Friendly, in his 2006 book The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics, introduces his fantastic research on the history of data visualization: “Statistical graphics and data visualization have long histories,  but their modern forms began only in the early 1800s. Between roughly 1850 and 1900, an explosive growth occurred in both the general use of graphic methods and the range of topics to which they were applied. Innovations were prodigious and some of themost exquisite graphics ever produced appeared, resulting in what may be called the “Golden Age of Statistical Graphics.”

As mentioned in part 2 of this series, Du Bois wanted his work to be “outstanding [in a] way which would bring my work to notice by the thinking world.” An incredibly astute academic, Du Bois had studied many sociological texts including the work of Henry Gannett, which was referenced in “The Philadelphia Negro” the year before the Paris Exhibition. So it is obvious that Du Bois was familiar with Gannett’s amazingStatistical Atlas of the United Statesfeaturing luxuriously illustrated maps and charts as well as sociological data he incorporated into his work.

Seeing as Du Bois was setting off on a career as an academic and social scientist and that “The Exhibit of American Negroes” was under a severe timeline, his priority was to craft beautiful charts which were as meaningful as possible with the modest tools at hand. Had the team been allotted enough funds and given the time, the charts might have been printed in color and would have likely looked like the work of Gannett.

Necessity being the mother of invention, Du Bois’s creative brilliance was instead put on display and the resulting handmade charts possess an artistic dimension that is missing from the more scientific work of the time. He likely chose basic, primary colors for their ability to easily imprint on his scientifically minded European audience. He stripped away any decoration in order to make the charts more effective and the precision of the charts conveyed scientific authenticity. While the works are remarkably beautiful, they were likely crafted for influence, not artistic merit.

While precursors to Modernism were present in the 19th century, the concept of modernism wasn’t established until the other ‘-isms’ had crystallized around Europe in the first years of the 20th century. France saw Cubism born in 1907, Die Brücke in Germany in 1906, Italian Futurism in 1909, Russian Constructivism in 1910, all eventually leading to the establishment of the Bauhaus in 1919.

It is with the Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle ;that art and design gained inspiration from science in bringing a more structured approach to the evidence of design. Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and many at the Bauhaus school stripped away the decoration from art and design to reveal a studied efficiency of form and color.

Unfortunately, most of the modernists were simply too young to have been directly inspired by the works at the Exposition. Picasso was 19 at the time, Gropius 17, Moholy-Nagy was only 5. Piet Mondrian was 28 but was living in The Netherlands. Kandinsky was 28 but had just traded a career in law to go to art school in Munich.

The fusion of science and art helped fuel the Bauhaus and Vienna Circle and certainly Du Bois was operating in a similar space two decades earlier — but as a sociologist. One can only imagine what might have happened if he and his team had found the right support at the Paris Exposition. Had the impact of The Exhibit of American Negroes been an international touchstone instead of a mere ‘success’ Du Bois might have continued to craft statistical charts and the line between this work and what was to come in art and design might have been possible. But that was not the case.

Design & Innovation

What is abundantly clear was that Du Bois was a visionary with a cause; a searing brilliance that could not be diminished, with the drive to impress his plight to a global audience. This work really stands by itself; unique in approach, execution, and historical relevance.

Many of the more unique charts are from “The Georgia Negro” series. Let’s take a look at a few of his most innovative works which also explore African-American socioeconomic growth and land value.

This is one of the most unique charts of Du Bois invention. Elijah Meeks writes: “I call it a Du Bois Spiral. It’s aesthetically compelling in the way it encodes urban to rural demographics….Du Bois knows you cannot precisely compare the lengths of those diagonals and spirals, and so he writes the number to go along with them. It provides the exact number of African Americans living in the various parts of Georgia as well as a more striking summary: the almost absurd ratio of red to any other color.”

Another way of looking at the ‘Du Bois spiral’ above is to envision it as a stacked bar chart on an extremely long scale. Since the single red section is so much larger, Du Bois wanted a way to set it off from the other categories. Since laying it out as a single bar was not visually pleasing, he gained inspiration from another technique that was also common at the time — the “snake.”

In some of Du Bois’s other bar charts such as the “Religion of American Negros” at left, Du Bois uses a “snake” to wrap the largest bar — this time, around itself. Du Bois combines this technique of winding the largest bar into a spiral with another completely unique solution of offsetting the categories as angles to highlight the smaller values.

Of course, the main point of the chart above is to quickly convey just how many African-Americans lived in rural Georgia than in the larger or smaller cities. The large, red spiral immediately leaves an impression; a visual beacon that draws the eye in a way that few charts could.

This one is a real knock-out. Not only do we see the 213.5% increase in acres of land owned, but Du Bois presents us the data in the shape of the state of Georgia itself. As the 25 red bars span the page, the rate of growth is not as impressive as the sense that Negro landowners comprise the entire state of Georgia itself.

A significant accomplishment and proof that African-Americans were prospering in Georgia,the theme of progress is central to the exhibit.Eugene F. Provenzo, in his fantastic book on the exhibit, elaborates: “Black Americans had been isolated as a social group as a result of “color and color prejudice.” They represented a group, who because of “the peculiar environment, the action and reaction of social forces are seen and can be measured with more than usual ease.” By studying the experience of Blacks, Du Bois believed that he could address questions such as “what is human progress and how is it emphasized?”

Providing the data just wasn’t enough, Du Bois needed to show the emerging independence of what he called “a small nation of people.” What better portrait could be drawn?

One of the more surprising charts in the series, the above pictogram;displays the growth of African-American land value as a series of growing bags of money.By showing the millions of dollars owned, it shifts the perception away from poverty and places the African-American landholder in the realm of tangible financial wealth.

The use of pictograms was not common in newspapers at the time but they were used in scientific texts. The cover of the Scientific American at left shows three groups of pictographs in its November, 1899 edition— the month before Du Bois started his work on the exhibition.

Interestingly enough, Du Bois’ work comes two decades before the work of Otto Neurath. An economist and sociologist by trade, Neurath was a co-founder of the Vienna Circle in 1907 and became a highly influential exhibition designer. Neurath eventually developed a visual language for communication that he called the ‘ISOTYPE’ — which is the foundation for many types of contemporary infographics. His mission was to use wordless graphics to illustrate relationships and explain complex ideas to the general public, an aim not dissimilar from Du Bois at the Paris Exhibition.

Another chart in the same sequence on land value and ownership from “The Georgia Negro”, the above chart is another experiment in curvilinear charting. With the success of the ‘Du Bois spiral’ above, Du Bois uses the same concept of ‘snaking’ a traditional bar chart around itself to display an astounding 6673.2% overall growth in Negro home valuables.

To the left, I’ve represented the above Du Bois’ data as a standard vertical bar chart. Represented this way, one can see the overall growth but can also notice the individual trends. Du Bois again opts for the more flashy version, impressing his audience with his draftsmanship and overall impression of meteoric growth.

While visually exciting, this experiment in wrapping bars into a spiral is ultimately not effective in visualizing the data for accuracy. The arbitrary use of a categorical color sequence, especially with the too-light (faded?)1895 category, confuses the interpretation, leaving the 1899 red line to overwhelm the chart and exaggerate its impact.

Also of note is the damage to the work because of the fragility of the materials. Huge chunks of the cardboard are missing, prompting the Library of Congress to put all of the original work in deep storage citing “originals are too fragile to be served.” — but I’ll speak more about that in chapter four.

Initially, I thought the above chart was a Bullseye chart, but those normally show correlations between approximate values. After mulling it over for a while I think this experiment was probably a stacked pie chart. Six years (1875, 1880, 1885, 1990, 1895, and 1899) are depicted by circular areas representing the taxable value of Negro property. As each expands from a black core they are labeled by graphic ‘stalagmites’ showing the 149% increase over the roughly 25 year period.

I’d argue that the above is not a very good data visualization. Since the largest value — the outermost red circle — is depicted as a thin “line” instead of the largest area, it does not read as the largest category. The color selection weakens the message as the black center commands the most attention for the smallest number, and the “clear” section for 1895 reads as empty. The labels literally point to the smallest value, giving the impression that $5,393,885 is the most important number on the page.

Then again, maybe the impression Du Bois was going for wasn’t so wrong after all. By setting a baseline of more than $5 million, Du Bois provides the official financial view of a subset of Georgia citizens. Like the ‘money bags’ chart above, the swirl of multi-million dollar figures on this chart repositions the conceptual understanding of African-American value from what was presumed to be ‘nothing’ to substantial sums of money — even at its minimum.

As a result, I think it’s best to see the above chart as a work of data art. It is surprising, bizarre, challenging and most of all visually exciting. A graphic puzzle designed to lure a curious audience and challenge perceptions.

No rest for the weary

Five months ago when I started this project, I had no idea how far I would get involved in it. I’ve been encouraged by so many people and feel that my work is adding something new to a conversation that I hope is just beginning. When I posted my first Medium article on Du Bois in mid-July, I set off on a 4-part series. But as the research continues I keep learning more and now will have to extend it to 6 parts.

This is partially because I was granted a very special exception by the Library of Congress to visit (only) one of the charts in person — which I did last week. It was very exciting and I need to discuss my findings as well as more of Du Bois’ design innovations in another article to be released soon.

Then, after discussing the legacy of this work, I will also publish another piece that outlines all the charts in order plus discusses another extremely exciting discovery that I’ve made. But I don’t want to spoil any surprises… haha

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations (Part 3) appeared first on Nightingale.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

The idea for the “The Exhibit of American Negroes” first came from Thomas Calloway, a classmate of Du Bois’ from Fisk University. In 1895, he wrote to over a hundred African-American leaders with a clear goal in mind. He begins by explaining the current European mindset:

“…the Europeans think of us as a mass of rapists, ready to attack every white woman exposed… The social and political economists of The Old World put down erroneous accounts… and not hearing the actual facts, reach conclusions which do us wrong… How shall we answer to these slander?”

Then Calloway lays out his pitch:

“To the Paris Exposition… thousands upon thousands will go… a well selected and prepared exhibit, representing the Negro’s development in his churches, his schools, his homes, his farms, his stories, his professions and pursuits in general will attract attention… and do a great and lasting good in convincing thinking people of the possibilities of the Negro.”

Calloway first consulted Du Bois and Booker T. Washington as they were already emerging leaders in the African-American community and along with Daniel Murray, the Assistant Librarian of Congress, a plan was crafted. After some political back and forth, the team was awarded $15,000 from the US Congress at the behest of President William McKinley — only four months before the opening of the exhibition. Du Bois was the obvious choice to lead the effort and he began the work on December 28, 1899. From then on the fingerprints of Du Bois are clearly evident, as outlined in the report of the Commissioner-general, February 29, 1901:

It was decided in advance to try to show ten things concerning the negroes in America since their emancipation: (1) Something of the negro’s history; (2) education of the race; (3) effects of education upon illiteracy; (4) effects of education upon occupation; (5) effects of education upon property; (6) the negro’s mental development as shown by the books, high class pamphlets, newspapers, and other periodicals written or edited by members of the race; (7) his mechanical genius as shown by patents granted to American negroes; (8) business and industrial development in general; (9) what the negro is doing for himself through his own separate church organizations, particularly in the work of education; (10) a general sociological study of the racial conditions in the United States.

The exhibition was designed to tell the story of an emerging people. It begins with socioeconomic data, then extends into the discussion of media and literature, then science, business and military excellence — all subjects in which African-American contributions were not yet recognized. Similarly, Du Bois systematically presents his data on three levels: national, state and local.

The data visualizations in “The Exhibit of American Negroes” are therefore split into two sections: “A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America,” which focuses on the national view of the data, and a companion work done the same year called “The Georgia Negro”.

Before we continue exploring Du Bois data visualizations, let’s first understand why this amazing body of work was created.

“The Negro Problem”

The first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, Du Bois studied and traveled in Europe before ultimately settling in at the University of Philadelphia. Desperate to help the plight of the African-American population, he turned to social science in an attempt to collect the compelling evidence needed for cultural change.

In an 1897 lecture, Du Bois says: “The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. No such opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of men ever presented itself to the scholars of a modern nation… the development of the Negro Problem [was not] one problem, but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex…”

In his Autobiography, Du Bois states: “I proposed to study the [Negro] by historical investigation, statistical measurement and sociological interpretation.” David Levering Lewis, in his excellent Pulitzer-prize winning Biography, explains: “More than any other American Sociologist during the decade after 1898, Du Bois undertook for a time the working out of an authentic objectivity in social science… Du Bois strive to avoid apriorism, to generalize cautiously only after questionnaires, census records, government archives, cross-cultural data and the rest had been digested.”

In 1899, Du Bois published the watershed work “The Philadelphia Negro” which he compiled nearly by himself, personally conducting some 5000 interviews. Below is a spread from the book which shows some of his data visualizations; clearly focusing on the scientific presentation of the statistical data.

Considering the audience he was preparing for, Du Bois realized that something more than the reporting of statistical data was needed for the Paris Exposition. “I wanted to set down… in some outstanding way which would bring my work to notice by the thinking world.”

This was not a scientific attempt to present the data, but rather a compelling narrative to sway minds and influence social change. This was data journalism in 1900.

Later that year, in November of 1900, Du Bois wrote “The American Negro at Paris” for The American Monthly Review of Reviews which acts as a report of the exhibition as well as a summary of the events in Paris. “The history of the Negro is illustrated by charts and photographs; there is, for instance, a series of striking models of the progress of the colored people, beginning with the homeless freedman and ending with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. There are charts of the increase of Negro population, the routes of the African slave-trade, the progress of emancipation, and the decreasing illiteracy.”

Let’s take a look at the charts. Here Du Bois explores education data:

The above vertical bar chart shows us a staggering 2479.5% increase in the enrollment of Negro children in school, beginning before the Civil War and ending a few years before the exhibition.

The chart begins at near-zero in 1860 as laws across the South forbade slaves to learn to read or write and made it a crime for others to teach them. During the Civil War, as the armies of the north swept through the south, the northern forces had to respond to the massive numbers of former slaves who escaped or were suddenly freed. It was decided that schools should be opened to prepare the growing ranks of free people. On July 23, 1863, the first school for freedpeople was established in North Carolina.

While it’s obvious to see the massive progress overall, the biggest eye-opener on the chart above is the 602% jump from 1870 to 1878. The cause was undoubtedly the creation of The Freedmen’s Bureau at the end of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau was a vast, rapidly-moving agency of early Reconstruction, assisting Freedmen in the South in many ways but most particularly by providing education. In just 5 years the group established more than 1000 schools. The bureau also was instrumental in founding such historically black colleges as Howard University in Washington, D.C., Fisk University in Nashville, TN, and Hampton University in Hampton, VA.

Likewise, as the above chart shows us, the jump from near total illiteracy in 1860 (three years before the Emancipation Proclamation) to only 50% illiteracy in 1900 feels like amazing progress. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell the whole story, as the White illiteracy rate during the same period was 6.2% and total US illiteracy was 10.7%. Certainly, access to education was the key factor to the massive reduction, but the realities of the time are stark. The finality of the 1-word title speaks volumes.

In 2017 the amazing data journalist Mona Chalabi remarks, “…even as late as 1979, illiteracy among black Americans was still four times higher than it was for white Americans.” She then goes on to brilliantly update Du Bois’ charts with current data while trying to remain as faithful as possible to the originals. Her strong analysis of Du Bois’ work is well worth your time and her ability to re-contextualize his work with current data shows how profound American inequality remains today.

Aesthetically speaking, the chart above, “Illiteracy”, is extremely novel. It represents comparative and sequential values both on the X and Y-axis. While slightly more difficult to initially read, its black and white lines create a visual tension that draws the viewer in. By plotting each axis to meet in the middle, he presents a slope of corresponding points, effectively mixing the data and chart marks into a single visualization.

In the next chapter of this series, I’ll return to this work to discuss an amazing development I found while researching it. I don’t want to spoil the surprise just yet as that is another amazing story to be told.

Like other charts in the exhibition, this chart makes a direct comparison of the condition of American Negroes to several sovereign European countries. As you can plainly see from his blood-red highlight, the illiteracy rate sits in the middle of the group. One infers the surprise Du Bois himself felt when he discovered the similarities when he writes “[Negro] illiteracy is less than that of Russia, and only equal to that of Hungary”

By making the comparison of these illiteracy rates, Du Bois directly confronts the stereotype of the typical American Negro as an ignorant slave. The data shows they are comparable to the same class as a European. This was a bold gesture by 19th century standards for an African-American to present on the world stage when voices of color were noticeably absent. By presenting the statistical comparison Du Bois creates a shockingly effective argument that also sidesteps prejudice.

Many times in data visualization the numbers might be left off the chart entirely as they are in the chart above.

In his great 2013 book “Data Visualization, A Handbook for Data-Driven Design” Andy Kirk breaks the reading of any chart into three stages: Perceiving, Interpreting, and finally Comprehending. The first step, perceiving, is where I think most of Du Bois’ charts really succeed, as they are so strong visually and leave an immediate impression. Du Bois clearly understands the language of visualization. He expertly delineates only what is exactly needed in order to move his narrative along. Which is to say “Are we really so different than you?”

Graphically bold but not as immediately impactful, the above chart speaks to the need to show an overall positive message. Du Bois accentuates the positive trend by displaying the 39% rate of increase in all Negro children in schools as three stacked bars and only labeling the rate of increase. The remaining 42.71% of Negro children not in schools in 1896 are not omitted, but displayed as a black box; hidden in plain sight.

Yet this chart is actually inaccurate. Du Bois distorts the visualization by truncating the 1876 and 1886 bars to appear shorter than 1896 to exaggerate the trend. As each stacked bar represents a total of 100% they should all be the same height. This was something Du Bois was clearly aware of but opted to distort the progress in an effort to add to the overall positive message of the exhibit.

While doing my research I regularly skipped over the above chart as it’s less dynamic than many of the others. I had even started to see it as maybe a work in progress, or even incomplete — but I think I was wrong. I believe the space at the top of the chart was left intentionally blank. I think it is ghost data.

Unlike the previous “Proportion of Total Negro Children” chart where children not in school are represented by a black box, Negro teachers were so scarce, so under-educated, and so overwhelmed, that Du Bois lacked sufficient data and represented them as simply “missing”.

In 1911 Du Bois published The Negro Common School in association with his students at Atlanta University. Compiled over a 6-year period, this report explores Negro education issues on a national level as well as 17 individual states. While there are many records of Negro and Freedmen schools across the US, the data collected specifically on teachers is vague at best. In the open pages of the report he elaborates “by the census of 1890 over 25,000 colored teachers were reported, and in their hands practically the whole work of the public school system for Negroes rests. There has not hitherto been sufficient recognition of the immense labor and sacrifice involved in giving the colored race teachers of their own blood in a single generation.”

On the next page in the report, Du Bois lists the actual numbers. According to the 1890 census, the total number of Negro teachers in 1887 was 15,815 of a total African-American population of 7,470,040 or 0.0002% of the population. By any estimate that’s a fraction of what was needed.

A decade later in 1920, Loretta Funke, in the “The Journal of Negro History” writes of the shocking ratios of children to teachers in the page clipping to the left. She later goes on to recount the crude conditions present in 1909: “There were no desks and only a small fragment of a blackboard in one corner. The teacher showed signs of having very little education himself and used no methods whatsoever in teaching. There was only one whole book for the entire reading class.”

To underscore the steady progress in spite of horrible conditions, Du Bois shows four growing vertically aligned bubbles to represent the 31% increase in Negro teachers in Georgia in 11 years. Since the bottom bubble is the darkest, it attracts our eye first and weighs the chart down. The focus is therefore not the maturing color sequence, but the darkest bubble at the bottom of the page; implying other heavier circles to come. By ending the chart in 1897, one can imagine a Parisian attendee asking the question, “What is the current number of teachers now, Professor Du Bois?”

In 1911, Du Bois ends The Negro Common School with a terse but amazing statement: “The white schools are bad. The Negro schools are worse. The South is still poor, and worse than that, it is, to a vast degree ignorant. Race antagonism can only be stopped with intelligence.”

Du Bois then includes a series of charts linking the type of education with their eventual occupation:

Another chart from the “The Georgia Negro” series, Du Bois catalogs the courses of study for African-American students. The proportional numbers wind down the page until the “Industrial” category displays a massive “snake” at the bottom of the chart. A technique not uncommon at the time, the snake shows just how disproportionate this category is to the others. The numbers to the left are helpful, but this kind of visualization is meant to be easily perceived and quickly interpreted.

Du Bois then draws a line from the course of study to the eventual occupations.

The above two charts are essentially the same but on national and state levels. While not a true comparison to the horizontal bars at the top, the roll-up on the bottom shows just how insubstantial the aggregation of all skilled craftsmen, teachers and clergy are in comparison to those working in agriculture or unskilled labor.

Georgia skews even more disproportionally toward agricultural laborers than the national chart. Interestingly, Railroad employees slightly outnumber servants. Teachers, on both charts, find themselves at the bottom of the list reinforcing the charts we’ve seen above.

In the Georgia chart Du Bois adds a subtitle likely not out of place in 1900, but chilling by today’s standards: “Males over age 10”.

I’m closing this article with another masterwork and potentially the most well-known of this relatively unknown series. The chart above presents a dazzling near-symmetrical chart of Du Bois’ own design, where two mirrored fan charts display corresponding categories allowing the direct comparison across an event horizon that delineates the “color line”.

The legend applies equally to both groups, and the distribution of the occupations between the two groups is surprisingly similar. Negro farmers are only 2% lower than White farmers. Negroes have a considerably higher percentage of service occupations while Whites have considerably more Industrial and mechanical jobs, but they are displayed here as comparable units within a circular whole.

Seeing this, the words of Thomas Calloway again ring true: “…[to] do a great and lasting good in convincing thinking people of the possibilities of the Negro.” Despite the discrepancies, the overall progress is clear. The cruel baseline of slavery is not forgotten, but steadily – painfully – surmounted.

At the beginning of the article, I stated that the funds for the exhibition were only granted by Congress four months before the Paris Exposition began. This clearly stressed out Du Bois who had to compile the data as well as draft the charts with his students.

In his Autobiography, Du Bois recounts “I was threatened with nervous prostration before I was done and had little money left to buy passage to Paris, nor was there a cabin left for sale. But the exhibit would fail unless I was there. So at the last moment I bought passage in the steerage and went over and installed the work. It was an immediate success. It occupied a small room, perhaps 20 feet square but the room was always full. The American press, white and colored, was full of commendation and in the end, the exhibit received a Grand Prize, and I, as it’s author, a Gold medal.”

In the next chapter of this series I’ll pick up the story as Du Bois and his students begin the actual drafting of the charts as well as some aspects of statistical chart making at the time. I will also discuss the claims that Du Bois might have been a precursor to modernism (which is pretty exciting stuff). But the most interesting aspect of the next chapter will be the discussion of ten of his most innovative and unique charts.

View the entire set of charts and photographs from the 1900 Exposition directly from the Library of Congress: Search Results: “LOT 11931” – Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (Library of Congress)The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich…www.loc.gov

Big thanks to Bhavna Devani, Tyler Curtis, Rachel Ramsay, and Jen Ray for the copy editing and detailed discussion!

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem” (this article)

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Data Journalism in the study of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Negro Problem” (Part 2) appeared first on Nightingale.

While Du Bois’ legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’ story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

This six-part series will cover many aspects of Du Bois’s exhibition, and links to all articles are at the end of each part. Be sure to check out the last one – there’s a big reveal!

Note: The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

The Exhibit of American Negroes

“The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris was created by activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, in collaboration with educator and social leader Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Callowayand students from historically black college Atlanta University.

In his remarkable 1968 Autobiography, Du Bois at the age of 90 recounts a lecture from a lifetime earlier in 1897. “The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. No such opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of men ever presented itself to the scholars of a modern nation. If they miss this opportunity — if they do the work in a slipshod, unsystematic manner — if they dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day, they do far more than hurt the good name of scientific truth the world over, they voluntarily decrease human knowledge…”

Du Bois describes the exhibition as “Thirty-two charts, 500 photographs, and numerous maps and plans form the basis of this exhibit. The charts are in two sets, one illustrating conditions in the entire United States and the other conditions in the typical State of Georgia”.The data visualizations in “The Exhibit of American Negroes” is therefore split into 2 sections: “A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America” which focuses on the national view of the data, and a companion work done the same year called “The Georgia Negro”.

In the article “The American Negro at Paris” he writes: “It was a good idea to supplement these very general figures with a minute social study in a typical Southern State. It would hardly be suggested, in the light of recent history, that conditions in the State of Georgia are such as to give a rose-colored picture of the Negro; and yet Georgia, having the largest Negro population, is an excellent field of study.”

Du Bois continues in his Autobiography: “I wanted to set down its aim and method in some outstanding way which would bring my work to the thinking world. The great World’s Fair at Paris was being planned and I thought I might put my findings into plans, charts, and figures, so one might see what we were trying to accomplish.”

The resulting exhibition was more than just a scientific report. It was a targeted attempt to sway the world’s elite to acknowledge African Americans in an effort to influence cultural change in the USA from abroad. The charts in the exhibition are arranged to tell a story with data that presents a complex picture of a people, their struggle, and their perseverance despite more than a century of enslavement.

This is where I’d like to begin.

The above chart is a masterwork of data journalism. It’s hard to look at the chart above and not feel like you’ve been kicked in the gut. The mountainous black area punctuated by the word(s) SLAVES sits immovable under a green ribbon that opens to the right of the chart.

The story it tells is simple: for 76 years no less than 86% of all African Americans in the USA were enslaved. But like most charts, the subtleties might be easy to miss. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on Jan 1, 1863, yet it takes an additional 7 years(and a Civil War) for the remaining 6,675,000 enslaved people to find their freedom.

The above is a breakout chart focusing just on ‘The Georgia Negro”. If one can visualize this chart rotated 90 degrees, this serves as a “double click” on the preceding chart above. It shows the percentage of free African Americans only in the state of Georgia, which at its greatest point was only 1.7% over a 73-year period.

Let’s look at the 1860 census to get some sense of scale. Of the total population of 1,057,286 people in Georgia, 462,198 were enslaved — 44% of the entire population.

Remember, the audience for the exposition were the elite leaders in science and business from Europe and the western world. Slavery in America was still very fresh in everyone’s mind. Du Bois knew a logical argument presented in scientific terms would provoke conversation and the brutally graphic truth of each of these charts would be impossible to deny.

Du Bois writes “… [the] exhibit which, more than most others in the building, is sociological in the larger sense  of the term — that is, is an attempt to give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings.”  Notice the emphasis on the term ‘human beings’ consistently linked with ‘American Negro’. By acknowledging enslavement as a foundation for African Americans, he also establishes a baseline by which to show how far this large group of human beings has progressed.

In the charts below Du Bois focuses on population growth:

By reducing each chart to its essence, Du Bois adds successive arguments to the larger message. The above chart shows a fairly steady 68% — 88% population growth over a 140-year period.

As early as 1807 an Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves was promoted by President Thomas Jefferson which sought to block the flow of slaves into the southern states. Then, in 1820, slave trading became a capital offense, and as promising as that sounds, only 74 cases were raised, few captains were convicted and only one miserable bastard was actually executed.

The chart above is proof that the measures taken to end slaving in the mid-1800s were a failure. Du Bois understood that his cultured audience knew the events and politics more than the raw data he provides — the data itself was an incrimination.

The above chart shows the explosion of the overall US population from 1830 to 1890 with only a marginal rate of increase for the African American population in general. Despite a huge boom in European immigration, few African Americans immigrated to the US during this time. Natural population growth and a decrease in the mortality rate after the 1865 passing of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery were the likely causes of the increase.

That said, the overall size of the African American population was still massive, which Du Bois brilliantly compares against the entire populations of several European countries below.

In “The American Negro at Paris” Du Bois says “At a glance one can see the successive steps by which the 220,000 Negroes of 1750 had increased to 7,500,000 in 1890; their distribution throughout the different States a comparison of the size of the Negro population with European countries bringing out the striking fact that there are nearly half as many Negroes in the United States as Spaniards in Spain.”

By visualizing African American population growth as a small nation growing inside of the American silhouette, Du Bois elegantly crafts a complex argument. As the silhouette of the country grows, the African American population also grows, not at a faster rate but as a distinctly different entity.

This is not a line or bar chart to compare numbers. Du Bois’ visualizes the data in terms of distinct nations. When viewed alongside the preceding image showing a fully African American-populated United States in comparison to European countries, Du Bois clearly implies the existence of a separate Negro nation/state.

One of my favorites, the above chart not only shows the fluidity of race as applied to the term ‘Negro’ but also slyly asserts a sizable portion of the White population had ‘Negro blood’.

By crafting a dispassionate argument focused on the numbers Du Bois makes an argument an African American would be prevented from articulating verbally. The massive black area is a sleight of hand to distract from the not-so-subtle accusation on the right side of the chart.

Another “double click” into the Georgia demographic, a single stacked-bar chart puts the emphasis on the values of black and brown to create an 84% block. The blood-red “40%”, is a corporeal smear only semi-visible in the center block.

But like the preceding chart, the grouping of the dark values points away from the uncomfortable data showing that 56% majority of African Americans were of some mixed blood.

Despite all odds, the exhibit was extremely popular and was awarded two grand prizes, several gold and silver medals, and 2 honorable mentions.

The main Exposition Report also specifically mentions The Exhibit of American Negroes: “It is impossible to do justice to this exhibit in a few lines of descriptive matter. The material presented was not only of high scientific value, but was shown in the most graphic way. There was no better example at the Exposition of the appreciation of the Exposition idea that exhibits must be made attractive and interesting.” (volume 2, p.408–9)

The noted African American weekly newspaper The Appeal in October of 1900 said: “This is the first time in the history of exposition abroad that the Afro-American has ever taken so important and successful a part…proof that all classes of [the American] population are prosperous, progressive, and valuable citizens.”

Unfortunately, reporting of the exhibit and its success were largely ignored in America by the white Press. However, many ‘persons of eminence and character’ did recognize the effort including Frank Taussing of Harvard who wrote “in my judgment no better work is being done in the country, and no better opportunity is afforded for financial support on the part of those who wish to further the understanding of the Negro problem.”

This last statement eventually became part of the problem for Du Bois, and the uplifting change he sought did not manifest in his lifetime. A mix of politics, prejudice, raw emotion, and lack of financial support undermined Du Bois’s scientific work — which I cover in part 5 of this series. The next chapter, however, will continue looking at the data visualizations themselves and will cover more of the remaining charts focusing on education and occupation.

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (this article)

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (Part 1) appeared first on Nightingale.