History repeats itself: What the Du Bois Challenge taught me about reproducing design
summary
Reproduces W.E.B. Du Bois’s handcrafted sixty charts using only R, proving complex historical layouts can be rebuilt faithfully; source CSVs and a shapefile become a pivot_longer long format, a stacked area (year x count x status), a coord_polar pie built from bars, and manual state coloring from a custom CSV. Uses ggplot2 + ggforce::geom_circle, scale_fill_manual for Pan‑African colors, showtext for fonts and cowplot::plot_grid to assemble panels; recreations succeed and inform a reusable checklist of intent, inputs, structure, coding choices and shareable outputs.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Recreating historical visualizations
- 3:42Du Bois' chart design
- 5:50Breaking down visualizations
- 7:20Recreating stack area chart
- 8:45Assembling multi-element charts
- 10:14Reproducible visual design
- 11:40Genuary challenge application
- 13:53Lessons learned
- 14:58Q&A
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