Hey folks, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed recreating the “data portraits” from the collection of visualizations that WEB DuBois and his colleagues presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. You can find the entire collection of “data portraits” in a book assembled by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (here) or as a collection of plates through the Library of Congress (here). Perhaps this isn’t so obvious to my non-US readers and viewers, but February is Black History month. In December or January, I had the idea to do a couple visuals for February to honor DuBois, his colleagues, and other great Black scientists of yesterday and today. When Executive Orders from the Trump Administration started going off the rails, I doubled down on the DuBois recreation videos. When all is said and done, I’ll have recreated 8 of the ~60 visuals on YouTube. I’m grateful to Battle-Baptiste and Rusert, Anthony Starks and Jason Forrest who have helped popularize efforts to recreate these visuals with modern tooling. I really hope I’ve done the visualizations justice. Please make sure you watch the great presentation by Starks and Forrest that was posted to YouTube in 2021. Frankly, I’m pretty amazed that I’ve been able to recreate these visuals using only the functions loaded with the Recreating fans, bullseyes, spirals, and other odd shapes in R has really taken a lot out of me! This week, I wanted to cover something I thought would be a little “simpler”. Check out this bar plot, which is Plate 9 from the collection. Part of DuBois and his colleagues’ goal in going to Paris was to provide context to his European audience for the situation of Black Georgians and Americans in general. This visual shows the age distribution among Black Georgians relative to the French population. The French population was older than the Black Georgian population. Beyond the story there are a few interesting things about this plot First, this is clearly a bar plot with the categories on the y-axis, the percent of the population on the x-axis, and the race/nationality used to set the color of the bars. This bar plot can be created using Second, instead of including an x-axis, the percentages are embedded in the bars. This can be done with Third, instead of having the legend on the right as we are accustomed to with ggplot2, this legend is directly below the title. We can pull this off with the Finally, the hard part of this figure is the inclusion of the “{“ to group the pairs of bars for each age group. We might be tempted to use A number of DuBois’s other visualizations also use these braces, so I think it is worth learning how to use them. Of course, there’s a package that will do this for us, but where’s the adventure in that!? If you want some data to practice with here you go…
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Hey folks, We had another great livestream on Wednesday building a figure from the Washington Post. I talked about this plot last month in the newsletter as being a faceted waffle plot. We had a lot of fun building the figure! I didn’t think we’d get to it, but we even came up with a clever approach to making the non-uniform circles to depict each response to the WP’s survey. You’ll have to watch the livestream to see how we did it. I have really enjoyed the interaction with the people who...
Hey folks, I’ve now produced three livestream videos. What do you think? Do you watch them live or watch them later? Or are they too long? I’m looking for honest feedback! I have to admit that if I hadn’t livestreamed these videos, they would not have been produced. It’s nice that I can more or less record and post without any editing. This is still a bit of an experiment. I think fewer people are watching the episodes which makes me worry that this might be an overall step backwards for you...