Anthony Starks on Recreating Du Bois’s Iconic Style

Allen would like to acknowledge Anthony Starks for his expert assistance with this article.

Earlier this month, Sekou Tyler, Anthony Starks and I thought it was important to recognize the accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois’ sophisticated quantitative research leveraging data visualization, is not as widely known as it should be. We decided that we were going to run a Twitter challenge where participants can recreate Du Bois’s data visualizations. We’re fortunate to have Anthony on our team because he has recreated all of the Du Bois 1900 visualizations! 

Anthony is a developer and designer who likes to combine art with code. His career started in the 1980s as an IT person in the pharmaceutical industry. One of the things he’s most proud of is helping to bring the Internet and the Web to a large corporation when these were nascent concepts in the early ’90s. Later, he was introduced to a free graphical library and developer environment called Processing. This integrated development environment (IDE) helped him discover the power of using code to generate visuals. He began to use this concept to generate diagrams to communicate ideas at work. This led to him building his own tools to make his bespoke visualizations and diagrams. “It was easier to let the computer do the work instead of laboriously pushing pixels around”.