PRIMARY MATERIALS
Link to digital reproductions of the 63 posters created for the 1900 Paris Exposition by W.E.B. Du Bois and his team/ (Note that the posters are presented in two sets at the bottom of the webpage…)
https://dataxdesign.io/chapters/dubois
Link to full set of plates, as high-quality printed reproductions, in Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Note that the plates are higher-quality reproductions than those found in the digital (only) interface provided above… Note also that the captions to the plates in Battle-Baptiste’s and Rusert’s book give vital detailed information about the posters, as well as some interesting and more granular interpretation…
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hampshire/reader.action?docID=7417619&ppg=55
Downloadable copy of slideshow (in pdf) on Du Bois’s life and work: “The Background.”
SECONDARY MATERIALS
Link to downloadable pdf of Du Bois’s short story (a work of speculative fiction), published in 1896: “The Comet” (available via Project Gutenberg).
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15210/15210-h/15210-h.htm
Link to “The Comet” on the Project Gutenberg website (it is the last story in the volume titled _Darkwater_).
Link to downloadable pdf of Whitney Battle-Baptiste’s and Brit Rusert’s “Introduction” to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits.
Link to downloadable pdf of Mabel O. Wilson’s essay on Du Bois’s posters.
READING AND LOOKING QUESTIONS
Downloadable file with questions (also below).
W.E.B. DU BOIS, The Georgia Negro: A Social Study (set 1) and A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now Resident in the United States of America (set 2) (1900)
Getting started…
1. Spend as much time as you need to look closely at all 63 posters (both sets). Perhaps this will be an hour per set (roughly 2 mins. per poster). Perhaps it will be longer. Make an effort to engage with the images/design elements of the posters (and not only the text). Not all posters will speak to you equally, and you should feel free to follow your own impulses. Write down some questions that arise for you as you engage with this material for the first time. Be prepared to share 1-2 of these questions in class.
1b. If you could ask W.E.B. Du Bois a question about the work that he and his team did to create these posters, or about the posters themselves, what would it be?
1c. If you could ask a visitor to the 1900 Paris Exposition – let’s imagine this person is not a US citizen – a question about their impression of the posters, what would it be?
2. Was the Black proportion of the US population (as a proportion of the total US population) larger or smaller under slavery than in the post-emancipation period? Which poster or posters give the relevant info. here? What are some conclusions we can draw from this?
3. Find the poster titled “Negro Population in the United States Compared with the Total Population of Other Countries” (set 2). What is interesting, and potentially provocative, about the way these data are presented?
4. What US state had the largest Black population in 1900? (You may be able to derive this information from the posters, or you may need to read Battle-Baptiste’s and Rusert’s “Introduction” to get this info.)
Moving into the readings…
5. Notice that Battle-Baptiste and Rusert start their “Introduction” by discussing Du Bois’s sci-fi writing/speculative fiction, rather than his scholarly writing or his scientific career. What is interesting about this?
6. On p. 8 of their “Introduction,” Battle-Baptiste and Rusert give a basic definition of “data visualization.” Find it, note it/write it down, be prepared to share it.
6b. According to this definition, is the knowledge that emerges from or that is generated by a certain data set something fixed or static? Or do data have the capacity to give rise to new knowledge in the context of future interpretation or imaginative practice?
7. What kinds of sources did Du Bois and his team draw on in making the posters? (Where did they get the data?)
8. True or False. The “American Negro Exhibit,” which was part of a larger exhibition representing the US in the 1900 Paris Exposition, included an on-site collection of over 250 publications by African Americans dating from before (or up to) the year 1900.
8b. How many publications by African American authors written and published before (or in) the year 1900 have you read? (List those you know/can remember.)
9. On p. 19 of their “Introduction,” Battle-Baptiste and Rusert note that, despite the inclusion of pathbreaking materials by Black thinkers/artists/scientists in the 1900 Paris Exposition, “the broader logic of the Exposition…was still an imperial one.” What do they mean?
10. In her essay about Du Bois’s posters, Mabel O. Wilson underscores that the posters both “rendered a geographic history of the African slave trade and mapped present conditions in Georgia” and “sutured the two together” (43). Why is this important for her? Whose ideas about Africans’ being “unhistorical” and “incapable of the development of any culture” does she Du Bois and his posters as refuting?
Go the extra mile and know something about the thinker/maker and his context:
–Where was W.E.B. Du Bois born?
–Where did he die? In what year?
–Where did he receive his college degrees? (List/name the institution/s at which he obtained his Bachelor’s degree and his doctorate/PhD.)
–True or False. When he received his PhD, he was the first Black/African American to receive a doctorate from the degree-granting institution.
–Of what well-known national civil rights organization was Du Bois a co-founder (in 1909)?
–Where are his papers currently housed?