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bluestarfish's review
4.0
I picked this up after going to an exhibition that had the graph illustrations done by W.E.B. Du Bois and his students for the 1900 Paris Exhibition. The book shows several of the graphs and has additional photographs that were at the original exhibition in Paris to showcase the lives and achievements of African Americans.
The data was used in the activism work of the time as a way of illustrating all the information that was being gathered. As someone who thinks a lot about communicating data (in graphs and maps and other ways) it was truly amazing to see some of these hand drawn graphs and the novel ways of presenting data. This data was painting a picture of post-legal-slavery life in the USA and charting the changes in society.
The book comes with an introduction and a timeline of some of the major events that are relevant to his work but otherwise the focus is on the pictures and graphs and there aren't any further explanations or interpretations in the book apart from some of the picture captions. The graphs and pictures are very powerful by themselves, even after so many years.
The data was used in the activism work of the time as a way of illustrating all the information that was being gathered. As someone who thinks a lot about communicating data (in graphs and maps and other ways) it was truly amazing to see some of these hand drawn graphs and the novel ways of presenting data. This data was painting a picture of post-legal-slavery life in the USA and charting the changes in society.
The book comes with an introduction and a timeline of some of the major events that are relevant to his work but otherwise the focus is on the pictures and graphs and there aren't any further explanations or interpretations in the book apart from some of the picture captions. The graphs and pictures are very powerful by themselves, even after so many years.
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