Dataviz lunch:
Replicating Du Bois with R

Federica Gazzelloni | March 4, 2024
R-Ladies Cambridge

Who am I?

My name is Federica Gazzelloni. I am an independent researcher involved in a couple of interesting projects about health sciences. I am passionate about actuarial statistics, also love to be part of the book club facilitators’ team with the R4DS online community learning.

Federica Gazzelloni

A bad graph?

It’s a challenge!

Replicating W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Visualizations

Walk me through it

History of the Original Plates dates back to 1900 when the graphics were first commissioned to W.E.B. Du Bois and exposed to the Paris Exposition.

Impact on Society

These visualizations were groundbreaking for their time as they provided empirical evidence of the social and economic conditions of African Americans in the United States.


The DuBois Challenge

It’s a competition named after W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent African American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist. The task is to replicate the original plates made of hand-made bar graphs, pie charts, and maps, illustrating various socio-economic aspects of African American life at the time.


Replicating the Original Plates

Set-up: Using R and ggplot2

Login to Posit Cloud to have the RStudio environment ready without installation 👉 posit.cloud

Load necessary packages

suppressPackageStartupMessages({
  library(tidyverse)
  library(patchwork)
  library(sysfonts)
  library(showtext)
})

Importing Data

Applying Du Bois’s Style

Understanding Du Bois’s Style

Key Characteristics

  • Color Usage

  • Font Selection

    • Public Sans [4] (sans-serif) & Charter [5] (serif fonts)
    • B52-ULC W00 [6] for titles & Vasarely-Light [7] for running text.
    • Vocaltype history of Du Bois

  • Layout Design

R E V E R S E - T R U E

Questions 🤔

Continued Learning and Engagement

Thank You!