Recreating a Black Literacy Bar Graph

Last updated on 2025-10-15 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How to create bar graphs with historical and contemporary data?
  • What R Code can create bar graphs with tabular data?
  • How to maintain a reproducible record of your data visualizations?
  • How to engage your own creativty in creating data visualizations?
  • How to use ggplot to visualize tabular data sets?
  • How to use color to improve accessibility of data visualizations?

Objectives

  • Re-create bar graph variations based on historical and contemporary tabular data.
  • Maintain transparent, legible, and shareable record of how you created your own unique data visualizations.
  • Export an HTML file of your completed Notebook that your instructor may ask you to submit.
  • Use color to improve legibility of findings from tabular data.
  • Implement your own creative ideas through data visualization.
Prerequisite

JUPYTER LAB NOTEBOOK

If you are using Jupyter on the Du Bois cloud for this exercise (no installation required), you can open the Notebook for this exercise on your web browser here

To continue the exercise using R Studio on your own computer, continue below.

You will learn how to use the R statistical programming language by creating two graphs:

  1. You will recreate Du Bois’ visualization of Black illiteracy rates in the US compared to illiteracy rates in other countries. Du Bois created the visualization in 1900.

  2. You will reproduce Du Bois’ visualization using data on Black college attainment in the US today. This aligns with how Du Bois saw mass education as one important strategy for furthering and deepining emancipation for Black Americans and others.

  3. An important context of Du Bois’s graph of Black illiteracy is that literacy was illegal for enslaved people in the U.S. until emancipation and the Confederacy’s defeat during the Civil War. Illiteracy then declined rapidly as Black Americans sought to empower themselves through education. The Du Bois plotted this decline in illiteracy among Black residents in the state of Georgia in the figure below. They used decennial US census illiteracy rates for Georgia from 1860 to 1890 that are available here. They likely wrote “50%?” for the 1900 illiteracy rate because the Census did not publish 1900 illiteracy rates (available here) until several months after the Paris Exposition.

How to use this interactive Jupyter Notebook

If you know how to use R on your own computer with R Studio you can copy, paste, and edit code in R Studio to do the exercise. If you have Jupyter Lab, you can also download this Notebook to use it on your own computer. You can download the Notebook or view a non-interactive version of this Notebook by clicking here.

Challenge

Coding in Jupyter Lab Notebooks

To use this Notebook interactively, Grey cells in the Notebook like the one below are code cells where you will write and edit R Code. To try it out:

  1. Click your cursor on the grey cell below. After you click on it, it will change to white to indicate you are editing it.
  2. After you click on the cell below and it turns white. Type 2+2 to use R as a calculator.
  3. After typing 2+2, click the play button at the top of the notebook page.

If you are getting an error, make sure there are no spaces or other symbols between 2+2.

If everything is working correctly, you should be given a reported value of 4.

Here is the code executed unsuccessfully because it includes an equal sign.

R 

2+2=

ERROR 

Error in parse(text = input): <text>:2:0: unexpected end of input
1: 2+2=
   ^

Here is the code executed successfully.

R 

2+2

OUTPUT 

[1] 4