Wow, these are absolutely brilliant! I've seen some 1800s sociological charting before and it's not very interesting. They seemed to struggle with the idea of visualization at all and resorted to a lot of charts and tables that the reader was to study and interpret, on account of there not being a lot of statistics that were invented yet. These aren't just strangely modern, each one is wonderfully unique and artistic and would be delightfully creative on a modern data-driven site like 538 or in the New York Times. Maybe I just wasn't reading the best turn-of-the-century social science, which is not a field I'm an expert in, but these seem completely out of their time.
If anyone is interested in more of this there’s a beautiful, high quality book named “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits/Visualizing Black America/The color line at the turn of the twentieth century” edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert.
When everyone uses chart.js or bokeh or matplotlib, you don't really see graphs that go out of the normal range of visualizations supported by these libraries. In a way the ability to use generic code hampers creativity because it's easy to find a "good enough solution" to your problems.
Organizations now carrying on the work of documenting Black life through the data science lens include:<p>Just Data Lab, <a href="https://www.thejustdatalab.com/team" rel="nofollow">https://www.thejustdatalab.com/team</a><p>Data For Black Lives, <a href="http://d4bl.org/" rel="nofollow">http://d4bl.org/</a><p>Detroit Technology Project Data Justice <a href="https://detroitcommunitytech.org/?q=datajustice" rel="nofollow">https://detroitcommunitytech.org/?q=datajustice</a><p>The COVID Racial Data Tracker, <a href="https://covidtracking.com/race" rel="nofollow">https://covidtracking.com/race</a>
It's always fascinating to see historical data visualizations. History is a great antidote against the bias toward the current era.
I feel like Ed Tufte would tear some of these graphics to shreds, but collectively the presentation manages to tell a powerful story.
There is a modern version in the works: <a href="https://www.blackbythenumbers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blackbythenumbers.com/</a>