Whitney Battle-Baptiste is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois
Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate
professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is the author of
Black Feminist Archaeology.
Britt Rusert is an assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois
Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts
Amherst and author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in
Early African American Culture.
"The book serves as an immersion into this unique set of
infographics, an analysis of their context, and a guide to the
design choices that made these visualizations so effective and
significant in their original context and today....W. E. B. Du
Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America is a necessary
read for designers, researchers, and professors interested in data
visualization, because it is time to recognize the historical
significance of Du Bois's work. At the same time, it enables modern
designers in data visualization to apply the lessons learned from
this historical moment to their own work."
- Design and Culture
"For any young designer or graphic artist coming up, it's an
inspiring account of how a blend of science and art can call
attention to 'invisible struggles.' There is brilliance in
truth-telling and sharing stories of real people in design which
help us create a deeper sense of empathy for the humanity of
others."
- Fast Company
"At the Paris Exposition in 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois, activist, writer,
sociologist, historian, exhibited a number of graphs, charts, and
maps that illustrate "the color line" and shined a spotlight into
how Black Americans were living. In "W.E.B. Du Bois's Data
Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of
the Twentieth Century'' editors Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt
Rusert collected these images together for the first time. The
result is as visually arresting as it is informative."
- The Boston Globe
"Collected for the first time in book form on the occasion of Du
Bois's 150th birthday, and accompanied by academic essays, the
infographics underscore the groundbreaking contributions of this
eminent intellect and activist."
- Metropolis
"Compiled in a new book from Princeton Architectural Press, the
diagrams distill data on everything from land ownership to the
value of furniture in black households, and display exquisite
stylistic ingenuity; Du Bois's bold colors and geometric shapes
were decades ahead of modernist graphic design in America."
- Fast Company's Co.Design
"Du Bois' data visualizations convey the power of information
design and "infographic activism."
- Booklist
"In re-envisioning Du Bois the artist alongside Du Bois the
scientist, this magnificent volume demonstrates that race is a
visual economy-a system of vision and division that structures who
lives and who dies. The contributors remind us that how we see race
(or pretend not to) matters as much in our scholarly
representations of social life as in our everyday lives."
- Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University, author of Race After
Technology
"Refusing the boundaries between art and sociology, abstraction and
portraiture, the evident rhythm and the evident incalculability of
human action, Du Bois gives data dimension and color, inside and
outside the color line, in compositional concert, the black
modernism and modernity he prophesies and performs always one step
away, two steps ahead."
- Fred Moten, University of California, Riverside, author of In the
Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
"The book is appropriately written by five contributors, each with
her their own distinct professional insight and perspective.
Section by section, it unravels the steadfastness and creativity
that was necessary to birth the American Negro Exhibit."
- Communication Arts
"These images are as precise as they are dazzling; sobering and
chromatic all at once. They also unleash modernist forms of
abstraction and conceptual artistry decades ahead of their time. A
graphic rendering of fire."
- Nylon
"These rarely seen and beautifully rendered data visualizations
show the promise and creative possibilities of black art and
science, more than a century ago, to remak eAmerica in the true
image of all her people. Drawn in brilliant and vivid colors in
these portraits, Du Bois's color line reminds us that the struggle
for justice is also the struggle for truth, then as now."
- Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Harvard University, author of The
Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern
Urban America
"This fascinating reproduction of all the data visualizations
prepared by Du Bois and his team for the American Negro Exhibit at
the 1900 Paris Exposition is so modern as to be nearly
anachronistic. The introduction is also excellent, briefly
providing historical and political context to the primary source
materials. These plates represent a very contemporary approach to a
social problem that still looms large in our country and will
interest scholars of African American studies, design, data
visualization, sociology, and history. Summing Up: Highly
recommended."
-Choice Magazine
"W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits is an exquisitely designed,
highly informative, and eminently teachable study-a testament to Du
Bois's seemingly boundless innovation, not only as a theorist of
race but as a visual architect and data artist. Battle-Baptiste and
Rusert have given us a gift in this volume: a feast for the eyes, a
feast for the intellect."
- Leigh Raiford, University of California, Berkeley, author of
Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African
American Freedom Struggle
"W.E.B. Du Bois wasn't just one of the foremost civil rights
activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was also a
data visualization whiz who was able to turn his sociological
research into innovative infographics that communicated the reality
of the African-American experience to the world. Du Bois spent more
than 20 years of his life working as a sociologist at Atlanta
University studying black communities. In 1900, he was asked to
contribute to the American Negro Exhibit, a showcase at the
Exposition Universelle in Paris designed to explore the progress of
black Americans since Emancipation. In response, he and his
students at Atlanta University created 60 different infographics on
topics like literacy rates, property ownership, and population
growth of black Americans using research from his sociology lab,
U.S. government data from the Census, other reports. More than a
century later, these innovative infographics have been collected in
a new book from Princeton Architectural Press called W.E.B. Du
Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America."
- Mental Floss
"W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits was published on the
sesquicentennial year of the Du Bois' birth, and it further
reaffirms the scholar's place as a founding figure in American
sociology. The recirculation of Du Bois' data portraits offer a new
opportunity to marvel at the forward-thinking work being done at
Atlanta University."
- Smithsonian Magazine
"You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you come
from. W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits offers a comprehensive view
of issues Black Americans have faced, from land ownership to
education. These infographics were presented at the 1900 Paris
Exposition. It's interesting to see how things have--or have
not--changed."
- Essence
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