W.E.B. Du Bois's Visualizations of 21st Century Big Data in R - Poster

Christie Williams, Alon Friedman, Lee Noel

Research output: Contribution to conferencePresentation

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois’s visualization work captures civil rights in the 1900s by visualizing Black America. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” according to W.E.B Du Bois (1901). Many R users visualize Du Bois’s unique style by using small data sets that produce two specific types of Du Bois visual creation (black and white bar diagram, and circle chart). However, many of those attempts did not capture the 21st-century big data voting population data in the United States. Our research question: Will today’s big data fit Du Bois’s data design? Our presentation will present the voting registration in the election of November 2020 Census data through the eyes of the Du Bois catalog using R. To utilize Du Bois’s visual catalog 14 diverse types of visualization, we will demonstrate our modification from the original design work by Du Bois, by adding more statistical computing power than utilized by Du Bois and adds on to ggplot2. We will employ R to illustrate that Du Bois’s work is more relevant nowadays than ever before, where the call for visualization of Black America is still as important as it was in the 1900s.
Original languageAmerican English
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 17 2022
EventuseR! 2022 - Online
Duration: Jul 17 2022 → …

Conference

ConferenceuseR! 2022
Period7/17/22 → …

Keywords

  • W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Visualization
  • 21 st Century
  • Big Data
  • R

Disciplines

  • Library and Information Science

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