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A Bloomberg-style terminal for the Golden Age of Black invention — roughly 50,000 census-linked Black American patents, 1870–1940, made explorable.
Live screenshots, pulled straight from the running site — tap any frame to open the slideshow.
The scale of Black invention in this era was systematically undercounted, and the wealth it generated never reached the inventors or their descendants.
The underlying data existed — in scattered scholarly datasets — but was unreadable to anyone but researchers. The challenge was turning census-matched academic records into something a person could actually explore and feel.
A research terminal that renders ~50,000 census-linked Black patents — and the 1.99M-record patent database around them — as interactive, explorable data.
Charts of Black patenting across 1870–1940, by year, region, and category.
A searchable database over the ~50,000 identified records.
The complete 1,992,169-record corpus, searchable alongside.
An interactive state map of where Black inventors worked.
The measured 8× patenting gap, and the suppression behind it.
The CPVF engine scoring each patent across five value dimensions.
An engine that quantifies the wealth exclusion cost — the gap, in dollars.
Seven scholarly datasets, cited and linked.
This is a data-engineering and visualization effort as much as a design one: census-matched records from ICPSR datasets, served from a PostgreSQL / Supabase backend, run through a cleaning pipeline to repair encoding corruption, then rendered as an interactive terminal with original valuation engines layered on top.
The valuation work — the Cultural Property Valuation Framework and the Lost Commercial Value engine — turns the archive from a record of the past into an argument about the present.
Built on ICPSR Studies 109970 / 193421 and the Brookings 2020 estimate, with a Stata→CSV→Postgres ingestion and cleaning pipeline behind the live terminal.
The terminal is live, built on seven scholarly datasets, with the Cultural Property Valuation and Lost Commercial Value engines quantifying what exclusion cost — one of the production platforms in the Cultural Market Data network.
Start with a $5,000 Lab — a working prototype and a clear verdict within days.