Recreating W.E.B Du Bois’s Data Portraits
Background and Motivation
In May 2017, I attended a talk: “Historical development of W.E.B. Du Bois’s graphical narrative” at the Data Visualization New York meetup. As an African-American, I was intrigued by the subject matter and fascinated by the visualization choices — especially, the now-iconic spiral charts. I made a mental note to attempt to recreate these.
In 2018, the book documenting the data portraits was published, and many others, including Nightingale editor-in-chief Jason Forrest, have written about the work (Part 1, Part 2). The time was ripe for me to take a crack at it.
Process and Tools
The idea of the project is to re-create the visualizations with as much precision as possible, preserving the original look, colors, and layout. The principle is to respect the 120-year-old design choices, using modern digital techniques. You can think of these as covers, not re-mixes (more on that later).
When confronted with a data visualization or information display task, my tool of choice is decksh — a cross-platform little language (aka domain-specific language) for…
