Democracy's Data - Dan Bouk

 Sub-title: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

The author, a computational mathematician and historian, takes us on a journey through the evolution of the U.S. census, using the 1940 census that was released in 2012.  He takes us through how the census questions were chosen, how the forms were distributed and tallied, how the enumerators interviewed the people and how the population responded.  A geeky, nerdy read for a genealogist that adds a perspective on what went in to creating one of our valuable sources.  Did you know the 1850 census missed a huge part of California due to a fire?  Or that in 1920, Tacoma Washington's rolls were overstated by 30,000 imaginary people?

Bouk tells the stories behind the data, beginning with "the Question Men', the government officials (all men, except for one woman) who chose the questions to be included, and which ones to exclude.  He covers the doorstep negotiations on what name was recorded by the enumerator and the force fitting of everyone into a form designed for a traditional nuclear family.  He demonstrates how what and who was left out of the census reflected the values, good and bad, of the 1940s and the decades before then.  It devotes a chapter to how a politician encouraged the population to not answer the census as he framed it as a a breach of privacy and it's use to identify Japanese Americans in WWII was an egregious abuse. 

I enjoyed learning the history of the census, its benefits and shortcomings and most of all its importance to our country.  

Quotes:

"The historian of quantification Caitlin Rosenthal teaches students to read the frame of the data- the column headings and row names whatever organizes and constrains the data."

"In 1850, the census began enumerating each free individual by  name.  ..Ralph Waldo Emerson called this time the age of the first person singular."

"Jennifer Mendelsohn's...#resistancegenealogy"

"The 1920 census was plagued by padding fiascos- most spectacularly in Tacoma, Washington...conspired with local enumerators to make up more than thirty thousand people."

"maps created by...risk evaluators for the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to support federal mortgage lending."

"The Census Bureau lent its experts to the INS to help design the alien-registration forms, to facilitate the nationwide process of getting immigrants to register..."

"In 1850, the official report noted that the new state of California had suffered a data catastrophe, with multiple counties' worth of figures (including San Francisco County) were burned or lost in transit."

"Big data ...innovator says don't worry about where the data came from...this book has made clear how foolish and dangerous a cry like that is.   When data ets represent people, those who want to ue that data should have to think..how those datafied persons can continue to be faithfully and justly represented."

"In 1929 the number of representatives was capped at 435 and the number of people represented was 40,000 ...and has risen to 700,000."

Published: 2022  Read: November 2022  Genre: History