01 “Negro” was the term used by Du Bois. It will appear in this paper only when quoting his work.
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and sociological study of the African-American inhabitants of Philadelphia.²
Du Bois used statistical design in the three critical ways. He collected new data (2) and by this informed about their life but also made visible the high share of Black inhabitants to economy and U.S. progress (3). Du Bois and his team overcame the fact that Black persons were not even included in the statistics until then, or if they were, they were listed according to criteria that he considered unrepresenta-tive. The chart’s aesthetic was uncommon and pioneeringly protomodernist (4).
Rhetorician Lynda Olman has written that Du Bois actually “decolonized the infographics”
(Olman, in press). His aim was the “reformation of white viewers’ thinking around Blackness and race, and uplift of Black viewers’ self-con-ception” (ibid). Du Bois’ motivation to make these graphics was to educate and inform by offering factual information nearly three dec-ades after the Emancipation Proclamation:
“The Negro problem was in my mind a mat-ter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ul-timate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.”
(Du Bois cited after ibid) In the following par-agraphs, I will intensively draw from Olman’s analysis and on the publication of the charts by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert.
Du Bois had a very limited budget, both in terms of time and money, for the process of data collection. Within less than half a year, his student team had brought together existing census data, but also supplemented the data with specially conducted surveys in Georgia (Battle-Baptiste/Rusert 2018: 17). The graph-ics were divided into two larger and a smaller intermediary section: “The Georgia Negro: A Social Study”, “A Series of Statistical Charts
02 It showcased Black progress in ten different categories: history; education; literacy; occupations;
property; publications; patents; industry; cultural organizations; and race relations in the U.S.
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Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now Resident in the United States of America”, and “Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta, GA, USA.” The graphics were produced for the 1900 World’s fair in Paris, where they were ex-hibited in a special section entitled “The Ex-hibit of American Negroes”. They were shown together with several series of photographs de-picting African Americans, their institutions, and patents within the U.S section in the Pal-ace of Social Economy, in the style of a mod-ern multimedia cabinet. The exhibition toured through different U.S. cities afterwards.
Du Bois’ data graphics stand out for both their content and their unusual protomodern aesthetic, which may have been additionally in-creased by the purpose of the exhibition. The graphics and maps were hand-drawn in ink and watercolor. One of the most uncommon fig-ures is a colorful spiral “ where he folds the par-allel lines of the bar graph into a continuous zig-zag and spiraling path that frustrates the process of visual comparison while amplifying the aesthetic aspects of the graph as well as a sense of disorientation”, as Olman writes (ibid).
Many of the graphs only reveal their structural meaning at a second glance, but they draw at-tention to their significant form immediately.
His strongest influence at the levels of con-tent, style, and color was Francis A. Walker’s 1870 “Statistical Atlas of the United States”
(ibid). However, although this was the most comprehensive volume on the subject of social statistics, there was only a little that could be learned about the specific life of Black Ameri-cans, except about general shares in the pop-ulation of the various States. Another model for the design of Du Bois’ charts might have been Charles Whittingham’s popular illustrat-ed version of “The first six books of elements by Euclid” (1847) which made extensive use of the primary color palette of yellow, red, blue, and black for geometric laws of form, long before De Stijl. ○○
FIG.6,7
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I will not go into the history any further at this point, but will instead discuss the example in relation to my central question. We could con-clude that Du Bois successfully applied data graphics in a critical way. Both the production and publication of the charts was an act of protest. He staged the marginalized who had been neglected by the powerful, he collected new data, and he reconfigured data for new questions; he even presented his findings in an uncommon design. So, we can assume the project was “a powerful counter-argument, stating that blacks had always been a part of world history and that ‘black spirit’ was evident in the range of culture on view – from liter-ature and poetry to patents and other works of independent black genius”, as Whitney Bat-tle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert wrote in their re-editing of the series in 2018 (Battle-Bap-tiste/Rusert 2018: 43). However, even after the very well-received exhibition Du Bois came to the insight that, “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.” (Du Bois cited after Olman) Du Bois considered his project to be a failure, because the scientific language was not adequate either to the subject or to his political objective. There was no time to inform about the conditions if the rulers did not want to listen, but maybe it was also not about mak-ing Black people visible within seemmak-ingly neu-tral abstract graphs, while obviously concrete Black people were being killed; there was also another, more subliminal reason for the failure within the graphic method itself which likewise had to do with ruling hegemony and which resides in the objectifying Cartesian tradition of what Max Weber termed “occidental ration-alism” or Eze more recently named “calculative rationality” (Eze 2008: 25). Olman highlights the panopticism of the charts:
“Infographics are tough to decolonize, how-ever, because their very raison d’être is panop-ticism – i.e., presenting a complex situation or problem as a simpler one that can be compre-hended “at a glance” (Barton & Barton, 1993).
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FIG.6 Increasing quantities in the shape of colored rings. W.E.B. Du Bois: Data graphic for “The Exhibit of American Negroes”, Paris 1900.
Assessed valuation of all taxable property owned by Georgia Negroes.
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FIG.7 Spiral-formed wound-up bar chart by W.E.B.
Du Bois: Data graphic for “The Exhibit of American Negroes”, Paris 1900. City and rural population 1890.
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And, panopticism as a rule reinforces the dom-inant political hegemony because to make a complex, messy situation “clear,” panopticism must reduce that situation, and the hegemony is the one whose “grid of intelligibility” (Fou-cault 1973; 1990) determines what matters and what doesn’t, what is ruled out and ruled in, what is foregrounded and what is background-ed.“ (Olman, in press)
Du Bois “entered a field of competition dom-inated by social-Darwinist and white-suprem-acist justifications […]” (ibid) by affirming the language of social statistics and synoptic data graphs and maps and by exhibiting at the 1900 World fair, which took place in the Western supremacist mindset of colonialism, indus-trialization, progress, and objective science.
By delivering data about a marginalized and discriminated group of people, Du Bois’ charts might even play into the wrong hands because, in line with Foucault, “panopticism – their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues – makes them tend to support hegemonic power struc-tures in spite of their designers’ intentions”
(ibid).³ Voicing criticism in the language of data graphics is bound to the framework of the factual and of the objectifying epistemolo-gy of Cartesian science. However, the author’s status of power also changes the power of cri-tique.⁴ For such results are and remain part of the paradigm of an instrumental reason’s fea-sibility. The expressiveness of the lines based on numbers is sober and cool, representing the
03 “An early and important effort in this turn, Barton and Barton (Barton/Barton, 1993) applied Foucault’s theory of panopticism to argue that while infographics exhibit both modes of panopticism—
the synoptic (generalization, overview) and the analytic (individualization, analysis)—infographics that are dominantly synoptic tend to support the hegemonic power of the technocrats who made and distributed the infographics, and to disem- power lay viewers from feeling they have any agency to change the situation being depicted.” (Olman, in press).
04 Du Bois might have had a professorship, but he had to cross the Atlantic in steerage (Battle-Baptiste/
Rusert 2018: 17).
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ideal of the disciplined morality of objectivity developed in the 19th century. The rationali-zation took place in the mode of an objectiv-ity that was authenticated and manufactured by machines or quantified procedures, a su-pra-moral, disciplined, and standardized form of knowledge that proceeds in a precise, cool, and measuring way. Consequently, they corre-spond to the ideal that historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison accurately described in the historical emergence in the 19th century as mechanical objectivity for dif-ferent media and fields of knowledge (Daston/
Galison 2007).
Thus, what Foucault understood by critique, namely “the art of not being so governed” (i.e., of not being so disciplined by methodologi-cal constraints), can be understood as a way of thinking and questioning that opposes all attempts to formalize methods. According to critical theory, such manufactured facts cannot be givens, because the numbers of statistics are socially fabricated. From them, even the injustice of social dominance can be deciphered.
Nevertheless, Olman insists that Du Bois’
graphical project did not fail because he was
“embracing heterological strategies of tech-nical visualization”, since “he also innovated within the dominant visual topology men-tioned above – framed by topoi of comparison, part/whole, degree, space, and time – to sub-vert viewers’ expectations around Blackness, racialization, and socio-economic progress”
(Olman, in press).
Barbara Orland and David Gugerli wrote in 2002 that, “[e]ntirely normal pictures do not require any justification. Everyone sees or knows them - no one reacts or wonders. If everyone thinks they see and understand the same thing, then that is reality. […] Because