Pat uses R to recreate an iconic spiral plot figure that WEB DuBois presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition showing the accumulation of wealth by Black Georgians using tools from the ggplot2, dplyr, and showtext packages. The functions he uses from these packages include aes, annotate, as.character, bind_rows, coord_equal, cos, cumsum, diff, filter, font_add, format, function, geom_polygon, geom_text, ggplot, ggsave, if_else, labs, library, map, max, mutate, nest, paste0, pull, rev, row_number, scale_fill_manual, select, seq, showtext_auto, showtext_opts, sin, sqrt, summarize, theme, tibble, tribble, and unnest. You can find the data and code he developed in this episode at https://www.riffomonas.org/code_club/2025-02-24-panel-25. 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
6:26 Experimenting with creating spirals
17:02 Adding spirals for each year and trimming to length
25:40 Converting lines into polygons
33:54 Matching DuBois's spirals and color scheme
38:42 Adding legend
50:57 Polishing appearance of plot