Graph replication: The Du Bois Challenge
This guide will present a series of graph replications for the Du Bois challenge in Stata. W. E. Du Bois was an American sociologist who played a pivotal role both in his research work on the black community in the USA, and creating unique visualizations during the early 1900s. At that point, there were no computers or reference guides, so the images were drawn using pens, rulers, compasses, and threads.
When the challenge was posted online, most people were replicating the figures in R or Tableau, or other dataviz-centered languages. My interest was to replicate the graphs in Stata. Du Bois drew around 60 graphs of which 10 were selected for the challenge. Out of these 10, I have done six, that are showcased below:
These were selected based on, (a) their level of complexity, and (b) providing new challenges for programming in Stata. As a result, three guides were written: the custom pie chart guide, the spirals and text wrapping guide, and the custom maps guide. The custom maps and the pie guides was planned regardless of the Du Bois challenge, but it helped provide the focus. The spirals were interesting to figure out. Since I had already done guides using polar coordinates, the…
