Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode #136: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits
156 Plays6 years ago
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! I’m just back from Germany attending the Information+ Conference in Potsdam and am excited for this week’s episode. This week, I chat with Britt Rusert, one of the editors of the new book, W. E....
The post Episode #136: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits appeared first on PolicyViz.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Conference Recap
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I am just back from the Information Plus Conference in Potsdam, Germany. Great time. I have more to write and say about that coming up, maybe in some future episodes.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hopefully getting some podcasts shows out about the conference. Great experience.
New Book Release Celebration
00:00:33
Speaker
But for today, I have some special guests on the show to celebrate a new book that's actually available today. Today is the first day you can actually get the book in your hands.
00:00:44
Speaker
So I'm happy to have one of the editors of this new book and one of the contributors.
Introducing the Guests
00:00:49
Speaker
So Britt Russert is with me and Silas Monroe. Britt is one of the editors of this new book, W.E.B. Du Bois' Data Portraits, Visualizing Black America. Britt edited this book with her co-editor, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, who wasn't able to make it today. But also on the show, Silas Monroe, who's one of the contributors and the graphic designer who worked on the book.
00:01:11
Speaker
I'm really excited to talk about this book, some different data visualizations, and looking all the way back to the late 19th century, early 20th century. Britt, Silas, welcome to the show. How are you? Well, thanks for having us. Great. Glad to be here. I'm really excited to have you guys on. Congratulations on getting this book out today. It's great. Thanks so much. We're super excited about it.
00:01:32
Speaker
I bet, I bet. Why don't we start this way? Um, Britt, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself and how the book came together. And then we'll then I'll turn it over to Silas for a second. Okay,
Britt's Background and Interests
00:01:43
Speaker
sure. So, um, I teach in the Du Bois department, the Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies at UMass Amherst. I'm a scholar, I'm a literary scholar by training. And I also work in
00:01:54
Speaker
sort of black critical theory. And I have interest in black visual culture and visual studies. And I recently wrote a book called Fugitive Science, which is thinking about sort of histories of antebellum resistance among black
00:02:09
Speaker
antebellum activists, writers and scientists who are sort of refuting scientific theories of race and especially scientific racism in the earlier part of the 19th century. And when I was finishing up that project, I first saw these amazing images that Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University had put together
00:02:32
Speaker
for the Paris Exposition in 1900. And in many ways, it seemed to be sort of genealogy of what I call fugitive science in that book that sort of happens later in the century. And so I was really interested in the kind of activist work and the sociological work of those images.
00:02:50
Speaker
I mean, I was also just really blown away by them because, you know, they're produced in 1900, but they look like works of modernist art. And so I was really curious to learn more about them.
The Book's Genesis and Collaboration
00:03:01
Speaker
Princeton Architectural Press actually came to Whitney Battlebaptiste, who's the director of the Du Bois Center here at UMass Amherst. And they were interested in doing a design book about these images and showcasing these images. And Whitney came to me and I had already had interest in actually writing about them. I was really interested in talking a little bit about how
00:03:20
Speaker
This was not just a project. It was not just a Du Bois project. It was a collaborative project done with a whole team of students and alumni researchers. And so since I already had an interest in these images, it really was it was serendipitous and kind of amazing that the press wanted to put together this collection.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's great. And so there are four different chapters. So when you and Whitney have an introduction, then there's two other chapters and then maybe I will let Silas talk about his his own. But do you want to talk about those those other two chapters and what people can expect? Yeah, sure.
Multidisciplinary Approach of the Book
00:03:51
Speaker
So, you know, one of the things that we really wanted this to be a multidisciplinary project that was sort of rooted in black studies, but also drew from different disciplinary forms of expertise and knowledge bases, in part because
00:04:06
Speaker
It's a set of images and visualizations that sort of demands that kind of attention. And so we were sort of interested in the fact that
00:04:13
Speaker
Du Bois was training a school of Black sociologists in the US South at the turn of the century, but they were also clearly using different kinds of ethnographic skills, interviewing skills, data design, visualization skills. They were using different kinds of tools and forms of expertise in order to produce these sociological studies about Black life at the turn of the century.
00:04:37
Speaker
So in part, I mean, we still have some questions. I think of questions about art training, if and how these contributors to the images were trained in art, but we really wanted to assemble a group of scholars who could take up these images from multiple disciplinary perspectives. So the introduction is written by myself. I work in black studies and also in literary and cultural studies. Whitney is trained as an archaeologist and also works in black studies.
00:05:06
Speaker
We have a chapter by Alden Morris, who's also in Black Studies and Sociology at Northwestern. And he recently wrote an amazing book called The Scholar Denied, which really puts Du Bois at the beginnings of the kind of methods and the history of American sociology and talks about how Du Bois founds the School of Black Sociology in the South at Atlanta University. So he has
00:05:33
Speaker
a sociological and historical sort of more take on the images. Then there's an essay by Mabel Wilson who works in art history and also in African American studies at Columbia University. And so she's taking up some more formal and artistic questions related to the images.
00:05:52
Speaker
And then Silas was our designer for the project who did a really wonderful job giving us a sort of design intro for the images. And then he also provided all of the captions for the images. I'm just really excited just that I think I'm hoping that the book shows different ways
00:06:10
Speaker
that we might approach and think about the visualizations themselves. But we don't have a DH scholar. We don't have a data visualization scholar who actually worked on the images. So I'm also really curious to see now that the book's out, to see how other scholars, including other design scholars and folks working in data visualization, will take these images up as well.
00:06:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And we should definitely turn back to that. But before we do so, I want to give Silas a second here. Silas, maybe you can talk a little bit about your background and your section and your work on this book. Sure.
Silas Monroe's Background and Role
00:06:45
Speaker
So I'm Silas Monroe. I am faculty at Otis College of Art and Design where I teach graphic design to BFA students and also in our master's program.
00:06:58
Speaker
I run a design studio called Poly Mode and I have cultural, academic, and business clients where I actually practice as a designer. A lot of my clients and a lot of the work that I do tend to have some kind of social, cultural value or sort of like embracing a kind of diverse perspective.
00:07:18
Speaker
When the opportunity came up, when Britt and Whitney approached me about writing about Du Bois' work for this project, I was super thrilled and ecstatic because for me, as someone who's both a design practitioner and interested in design history, to me, this work was a missing piece in the lineage of design history. And the work that he and his students did together, they predate a lot of
00:07:48
Speaker
iconic avant-garde movements of design history, including the Bauhaus, Russian constructivism, and Duch style. And what's interesting about the global stage that these gouache ink and watercolor designs were displayed on in 1900, they actually could have influenced and impacted the people that would start the Bauhaus 19 years later, which
00:08:15
Speaker
to me was like a total, my mind kind of exploded pretty much when I thought about, you know, a kind of reverse engineering about, you know, how a black man, you know, living in the Southern Eastern United States could sort of generate forms that might influence this European avant-garde that is sort of the backbone of what we think of as design aesthetics, both in Europe and the US and sort of globally now.
00:08:45
Speaker
Right. Can you paint a picture for us as it were of where these images appeared for the first time?
1900 Paris Exposition and Du Bois' Work
00:08:52
Speaker
So this is all in the World Fair in Paris, but can you sort of set the stage for us of where this was and why these particular images and how they were displayed? So they were part of a study that Du Bois was put together and was commissioned for the American Negro exhibit at the Paris Exposition in 1900 in a group of
00:09:14
Speaker
black activists, including Thomas Callaway, who organized the exhibit with the help of Booker T. Washington, petitioned the US government for a kind of African-American exhibit to be displayed at the Paris Exposition as part of the sort of American component and contribution to that exposition. And so Callaway went about sort of assembling an exhibit that really showcased
00:09:41
Speaker
black progress that had been made in the decade since emancipation in 1863, and that really highlighted the kind of work of HBCUs, so the kind of work that was being done at historically black colleges and universities across the South. And so Du Bois was his old buddy from Fisk University, which they attended together as undergrads. And Du Bois at that time was teaching at Atlanta University.
00:10:08
Speaker
And so Du Bois and his students put together was basically a sociological exhibit. There were two aspects of it. One was sort of more focused on national statistics that thought about the impact of slavery and freedom on African-American populations at the turn of the 20th century. So it has this more national scope and I was also really embedded in thinking about
00:10:34
Speaker
the afterlives and legacies of slavery. And then the other part of the exhibit was a kind of a more regional case study that was called the Georgia Negro. And that was really focused more on data and thinking about different aspects of sort of demographics and statistics and aspects of life for African Americans in Georgia at the turn of the century.
00:10:57
Speaker
So scholars have really focused on that exhibit. I mean, so far as there was photography that was included, there were a couple of albums that Du Bois also included in the exhibit, but there hasn't been as much work done on these amazing dated visualizations, these infographics that were also a part of the sociological exhibit. And so those images appeared on the wall and as part of the American Negro exhibit,
00:11:26
Speaker
and would have been viewed by European audiences at the Paris Exposition, including some Black visitors in Europe during that time. It became a prize-winning exhibit, and so when Callaway and his group packed up and brought that exhibit back to the United States, it traveled
00:11:43
Speaker
to regional and other world's fairs back within the United States. And I think it was really significant that they had won a prize at the Paris Exposition. So that kind of like cosmopolitan and a sort of European validation really meant something when the exhibit was
00:12:00
Speaker
touring back in the Jim Crow context. So I think one of the really interesting things is that they were thinking about multiple audiences at once, I think, when they were designing the images. Some of the images have French, so they clearly were thinking about their European audience. I think they were thinking about European workers and how they might think about their relationship to black workers in the US. But I think that they also had in mind the fact that
00:12:28
Speaker
African-American viewers back in the United States would possibly see these images as well. And they did. So a group of Black club women in Buffalo, New York actually petitioned and brought the American Negro exhibit. And it was showcased there during the Pan-American exposition in 1901. And so there were multiple audiences for the original images. And then after that, the images ended up in the collections of the Library of Congress.
00:12:56
Speaker
I don't want to go on for too long, but there's also some really interesting questions about what they've been doing there, who, if anyone, has seen them since that time. And we do have in the Du Bois papers here an indication, a letter to Thomas Callaway from Du Bois that indicates that Du Bois wanted these images back.
00:13:14
Speaker
And so we can only speculate on why he wanted them back and what he planned to do with them. But the fact that the images still remain in the collection at the Library of Congress indicates that he actually didn't get his wish and he didn't get those images back. Right. So let's turn to the data visualization part itself.
00:13:32
Speaker
It's an obviously fascinating collection. A lot of people have written about it, not in a book form, but you know, several blogs. And I'm curious about your thoughts about the visualization type. So a lot of these images in the book are not standard graphs, right? They are not the sort of things that we think about. They are not
00:13:48
Speaker
bar charts and simple maps and line charts you've got instead. The cover is a circular or radial bar chart. I'll put the picture on the side, but most people sort of be familiar with this, where instead of the bars being strictly horizontal or vertical, they sort of wrap around a circle. And
00:14:05
Speaker
A lot of people today, a lot of people in the data visualization field will say, well, that's not a great chart type because it's hard to clearly see the patterns. And there's lots of other, maybe one would even call them innovative graphic types. And I'm curious about your thoughts on how these visualizations, I guess, were
00:14:24
Speaker
built initially how they are different and maybe better than standard chart types or maybe not and what Du Bois may have known at the time while he was creating these in terms of other work by Playfair and maybe some others that were thinking about how to visually communicate data. So maybe I'll start with Silas on that since we were talking about that before we started recording about your thoughts on where he came from and where you think he was sort of going with these.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of factors that contribute to the uniqueness of these diagrams. I think one of the factors is what Britt had already mentioned, that these were created as a collaboration between Du Bois and his students. And actually our research found that there was one sociology alumni of Du Bois's, William Andrew Rogers, who is probably the sort of point person for actually
00:15:21
Speaker
drawing and guashing and coloring and actually making the diagrams with other students
Innovative Visualizations by Du Bois
00:15:29
Speaker
in the program at Atlanta University. And so these were a group of really bright and thoughtful sociologists but not trained as designers. Though Du Bois was very well-read and well-traveled, had already been to Europe before, would be quite familiar with previous case studies of other statisticians or
00:15:51
Speaker
researchers who were making visual form, like you mentioned, William Playfair, the Scottish statistician who created the pie chart. He would also likely be familiar with Florence Nightingale's work and her sort of rose diagram and someone who was using a graphic form to tell a story and enact social change with her campaign for healthcare in England, especially for soldiers.
00:16:19
Speaker
So they were looking at other sort of forms of data visualization, but also the schedule was super compressed. Callaway and the other collaborators included Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and his students only had a few months to generate all this work. So I think part of some of this innovation, when you look at that one spiral chart was like, how can we kind of get all this data and express it?
00:16:45
Speaker
in a short period of time. So I think that hacking a bar chart into sort of a spiral was also about how does it fit into this 22 by 28 inch frame of the diagrams. And one other thing to add to what Britt was saying, these were designed to be displayed in a very interactive way. So they were hanging on these wing back frames that the viewers would get a chance to sort of turn and page through as a kind of early
00:17:15
Speaker
experience design. So I think the combination of sort of novice training in visual making and also just interest in exploring and experimenting.
00:17:28
Speaker
required them to sort of do non-standard forms of diagrams. So the fact that Du Bois and his team were able to see some of the work that was going on, but they weren't inherently or trained as graphic designers, even if there was graphic design training at the time or necessarily mathematical people, do you think that freed them up to be more innovative in the graphs that they created? I think so. I think that they had a time crunch. I think that they were
00:17:57
Speaker
creative and generous and you know, they were looking at certain case studies, but knowing that this would be a global audience, I think they just had that combination of, and this happens I think with the best design projects is when you're sort of under the gun of a deadline and you know, they had an excellent set of data sets and you can actually even see as you look at the plates, oftentimes they were, you can see sort of their pencil work
00:18:27
Speaker
underneath the gouache where they were making attempts at things. And in addition to the 63 final diagrams, they're also a series of charts showing their data and also lettering sketches and in-progress attempts on the backs of some of these prints.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, one of my favorite things is, is how you can, the more you look at the images, the more you start to see more hands at work. You know, you see like different hand forms of handwriting and different pencil markings. And so in terms of the collaborative nature of the design, I'd like to, I think it's interesting to think about how the collaboration itself potentially
00:19:08
Speaker
produce novel forms of data visualization. And I also think, you know, it's important to note that they were getting training in math and also, you know, sociological methods at Atlanta University. And that's one of the most powerful arguments about Alden Morris's book is that Du Bois was sort of pioneering
00:19:27
Speaker
an empirically-based, statistically-based method for sociology at a time when what passed as social science was really a set of racial and other forms of biases. And so we think about statistics and its sort of rootedness in forms of eugenics and other forms of social science that were really using science in order to kind of reproduce
00:19:50
Speaker
racist and classist and sexist ideas was that Du Bois and his team were producing data and producing a kind of black data in opposition to forms of science and social science that actually weren't rooted in empirical work. And I think that's really crucial in terms of the thinking about these
00:20:14
Speaker
these images and their relationships to science and social science. But I also think the spirals are really interesting because I think that they were attempting to make and intervene into sort of debates about
00:20:27
Speaker
race and intelligence and capacity and these kinds of things. But I think they also were trying to capture the real irrationality of the Jim Crow system and the kind of surrealness of Black life during this period. And so for me, I think those artistic flourishes when you see those spirals and those kinds of motifs for me are about capturing the kind of
00:20:52
Speaker
irrational dimensions of American life and policy and law during this period. That was really interesting. So I want to close up with two questions, one for each of you. And I want to jump off this topic that you just talked about, Britt. So let me follow up where you're going. What was the impact?
00:21:09
Speaker
of these images and this work, I think, more generally on American society and American culture at the time, and maybe even American study of sociology in the university system at the time. What was a sort of broader impact that these had across the country? Should I start? So, I mean, I guess, well, I'm curious to hear what Silas thinks. What do you think, Silas?
00:21:39
Speaker
sort of uh that's a good question um like I know what the impact of them is now yeah but um you know it's funny because I think in some ways and Alden Morris talks about this like Du Bois's legacy both as a sociologist and researcher I think has been sort of underplayed and erased um for many years in the larger discourse of
00:22:08
Speaker
his impact. Obviously, he was so multi-talented and impactful, you know, through his work in NAACP, his other kind of writing and publishing. But I think as the sociologist, and even this work is sort of a data visualization person, has been pretty much ignored in certain academic circles. I do know that the
00:22:37
Speaker
pieces themselves were wildly popular, both in Europe and domestically, when they came back. And a lot of people would have seen them, and they made a big impact, especially, I think, in African-American circles, because a lot of the sites and venues that were seen domestically were historically black colleges. But I wonder, especially as someone who's been trained in design history and visual culture,
00:23:06
Speaker
This was just not discussed at all anywhere in design history. And I think when they got digitized by the Library of Congress and were seen publicly in the digital world, they caught fire because they were so relevant in terms of their visuality, but also the kinds of issues of equality and balance. And there's actually even, Britt, I think you're kind of getting a sort of poetic
00:23:34
Speaker
quality to some of these diagrams. Like I look at the one chart that's the assessed valuation of all taxable property owned by Georgia Negroes where it has these wedges, these triangles in these series of concentric circles. He really is kind of like making this argument of kind of like piercing and debunking some of these myths around the lack of equality of black people.
00:24:01
Speaker
to other Americans and other global citizens, both through the data and also through the form. Yeah, and you know, there's also some of the images that they kind of have this, there's, they're actually multimedia. So there's one that incorporates photographs, which, and there's this kind of collaging element. So I think the ways that they kind of look forward to later forms of, you know, I don't know,
00:24:21
Speaker
like forms of black art making and other forms of art making is really interesting. I mean, I guess I would say we don't yet know the influences of these, the influence of these images because they have been pretty, they haven't been widely viewed since their original kind of display in the early part of the century. So, I mean, I think there is more work to be done
00:24:44
Speaker
in terms of these individual researchers. So there are these Atlanta University studies that have been published and there's re-publications of those. And I think there's more work to be done to think about Du Bois' network of field researchers, which included alumni from Atlanta University who were in Atlanta University, but were also spread out across the US South. And I would be curious to know and to learn more about
00:25:10
Speaker
forms of design and other forms of visualization that may have been a part of their sociological and other forms of work. Many of these people went on to be teachers, so I think there's a question of the use of black data and black design
00:25:25
Speaker
within black classrooms throughout the 20th century that I would want to know more about. But I also think you know we were really interested in doing this project because since they haven't been you know they've been sort of in the in the archive and not really widely available since
00:25:42
Speaker
the early part of the century, I think that there's possibilities for their influence today in terms of educational use, inspiring forms of art making, the kind of movement around, you know, data for Black lives and to think about other forms of production of data.
00:26:01
Speaker
that's oriented towards emancipation projects rather than the surveilling and policing of Black communities. I really love thinking about, I mean, one of the things about Du Bois, right, is that he did so many things and we think of him wearing so many hats, but we really have not thought of him yet in a design context, right? We don't usually think of him as being a designer. Silas has this amazing moment in his intro where he talks about Du Bois as the,
00:26:29
Speaker
leader of a design team in the South during this period, which I just think is really important and interesting. And I would also add, you know, it's really important to think about then Du Bois as a curator of this work. So he had to basically cobble together the funds in order to travel to Paris. And he clearly had ideas about how this work should be installed and how it should look visually. So I think maybe there's even something to be done and to think more about
00:26:57
Speaker
Dubois as a curator. Oh, okay. So I think there's more to say about Dubois as a curator. And I would love to see this work taken up then in multiple different places today. So that's to say that I think it's really great that even though there were these decades in which these images were kind of lost and not seen that I think I'm hoping that they can take on a new life today.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, that is that is really interesting. My last question, I want to flip this around a little bit. We've talked a lot about the production of these Du Bois and his teams. And now I'm curious about what you think about how
00:27:41
Speaker
um, the public, uh, viewed them or understood them, especially at the time. I mean, now we're surrounded by data and graphs all the time. And there's obviously sort of a burgeoning data visualization field and there's research going on. And I'm curious what you might, what you think about how people who are viewing these at the time may have thought about them and, and the messages they may have taken away from them.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really great question.
00:28:22
Speaker
This is where the kind of context of the world's fairs really matters. So the Paris Exposition was one of these turn of the century expositions that was about displaying the powers of industrialization and the sort of really kind of touting the sort of modernity of global imperial powers. And so it was really a
00:28:51
Speaker
a fair that was about the projection of Western progress. And so I think it's really important to think about how these images were participating in, but also challenging those discourses. And so, for example, the fact that these images were insisting on sort of the legacies and the histories of slavery as they had shaped the kind of
Critique of the U.S. through Visualizations
00:29:19
Speaker
shaped the US itself, I think really was a critique of the idea of America as the civilized and civilizing nation. So I think that that was really important in terms of what they were showcasing through the images.
00:29:35
Speaker
And one of my favorite things about the kind of modernist design of the images and this kind of looking forward to a kind of European avant-garde is that I think that partly the images were constructed to look so modern and clean and almost like machinic, even though they were hand drawn, is I think that the contributors to the images wanted to showcase
00:29:59
Speaker
Black cosmopolitanism wanted to say something about Black modernity, specifically in the South. I think they were making an argument about Atlanta as a kind of Black mecca in a place of Black industrialization and progress. But they were also making a claim to modernity while at the same time making a huge critique of the US as a supposedly civilized place.
00:30:23
Speaker
Because in the United States at the time, this was a it was actually a backward looking regime, right? And it was the gym, it was the age of segregation. And so I think there is through the images themselves, I think they were trying to convey their kind of status.
00:30:39
Speaker
as a kind of nation within a nation, as a black nation within a nation that was at pace with the European superpowers, but that the United States itself was actually non-modern and was actually a barbaric nation. It was not actually an industrializing and forward-looking. Yeah, interesting. I think one other thing that's unique about just this display showing data was
00:31:04
Speaker
If you look at the other exhibits that were happening at the World's Fair and the history of sociology, it was more about creating these dioramas that would have stuff representations or things that were object studies to present evidence, whereas this was saying,
00:31:23
Speaker
information can be a kind of communication and so I think these are the first time where you are releasing like data visualization showing up in a way that could make an argument and then it was compelling because of the whole uh gold prize winning aspect of the exhibit and it's really interesting that the american negro square footage wise in the palace of social economy was relatively small compared to the other exhibits but it's density it's
00:31:52
Speaker
complexity between the diagrams, the other artifacts in the space. I really do think that Du Bois and his team and his collaborators were thinking about it like a bit of an experience design and using this data as a way to have a kind of fresh perspective on all these issues of racism, of a sort of backwards perspective that the US was starting to come out of.
00:32:19
Speaker
And I think they also were just constantly reminding viewers that the United States' industrial progress happened through the labor of enslaved people and nominally.
00:32:35
Speaker
though there's all of these images that there are these huge black blocks of color. And so the continual reference back to slavery, that it is slavery that makes industrialization happen, that I think that they really were powerfully conveying visually. And it was a huge intervention within the broader
00:33:00
Speaker
sort of logic and focus of kind of progress, industrialization and freedom within the fair itself. Right.
00:33:10
Speaker
Wow.
Episode Summary and Farewell
00:33:11
Speaker
Well, that, I mean, that, uh, is, is probably the, uh, most historical perspective I've had on the show. Well, Britt and Silas, thanks a lot for coming on the show today. It's, um, it was great to chat with you. Thanks for having me. And thanks everyone for listening. So the new book,
00:33:34
Speaker
W.E. Du Bois' Data Portraits, Visualizing Black America is available today. So you can go run out and get it right now. It can be in your hands. So please do go grab it. I'll put a link to it, of course, on the show notes page. If you have any questions, please do get in touch. Let me know if you have any questions or reach out to Britt or Silas or any of the authors. I'm sure they'd be happy to talk more about the work that went into this book.
00:33:59
Speaker
So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. A little bit more of a historical context of data visualization, always an interesting topic. So thanks so much for tuning in. Until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast.