Video

Silas Munro on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America

Lecture at SFPL Main Library, Koret Auditorium
Tue, Oct 29, 2019
6:00pm–7:30pm PDT

W. E. B. Du Bois was a prolific author, renowned sociologist, fierce civil rights advocate, co-founder of the NAACP, and a historian of black lives. He was also a pioneer in data visualization. Working with ink, gouache, graphite, and photographic prints, Du Bois and his student and alumni collaborators at Atlanta University generated crisp, dynamic, and modern graphics as a form of infographic activism. 63 brightly colored broadsheets were exhibited in Paris and made 20 years before the founding of the Bauhaus. These visualizations offer a prototype of design practices now vital in our contemporary world—of design for social innovation, data visualization in service to social justice, and the decolonization of pedagogy.

Letterform Archive Silas Munro on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America