Du Bois Data Visualisation

Technologies of Representation, Georgia Tech, 2018. A Du Bois data visualisation (1890) updated into the 21st century through elements of graphic design and copy. W.E.B. Du Bois, among other things, was an African American sociologist, activist and author. He noticed the potential of data and remarkably created data visualisations that he could share with the world in a time where this wasn't the norm, especially for an African American. He wanted to show us the past, the present and the future by letting data visually speak the narrative. For this project we compared a data visualisation from the year 1890 with two visualisations that we re-created with 2017 statistics. We kept the same visual aesthetic of the Du Bois original (“Proportion of Whites and Negroes in the different classes of occupation in the United States”), however in one of the visualisations we layered additional data now adding gender as an aspect as we felt it fitting in a more modern context. “Data is always people” (O’Neill. 2016)