Pat uses R to recreate an area plot, Panel 51, from WEB DuBois's collection of 1900 Paris Exposition data visualizations showing the change in the percentage of Blacks who were free in America between 1790 and 1870 using tools from the ggplot2, dplyr, and showtext packages. The functions he uses from these packages include aes, annotate, coord_cartesian, font_add, geom_area, geom_label, geom_text, geom_vline, ggplot, ggsave, if_else, labs, library, mutate, paste0, pivot_longer, scale_fill_manual, scale_x_continuous, select, seq, showtext_auto, showtext_opts, theme, tribble, and unit. You can find the data and code he developed in this episode at https://www.riffomonas.org/code_club/2025-02-13-panel-51. Pat's newsletter describing how he would go about generating a similar figure can be found at https://shop.riffomonas.org/posts/remaking-classic-hand-drawn-data-visualizations-from-1900. The book Pat mentions by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, titled "W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America" is available at https://amzn.to/4heJOWZ. A great set of talks about the DuBois data portraits is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZST1AZj-dQ&ab_channel=Tableau. The Anthony Starks GitHub repository can be found at https://github.com/ajstarks/dubois-data-portraits/. If you have a figure that you would like to see me discuss in a future newsletter and episode of Code Club, email me at pat@riffomonas.org!
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If you want to cite this video, please consider citing https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mra.01310-22
0:00 Introduction
5:30 Generate initial area plot with labels
10:30 Customize fill and axis appearance
14:37 Add titles and section labels
21:47 Adjusting text labels and adding grid lines