An eye-opening story of the people who make the census, the United States’ largest and most consequential dataset, and the growing threats to their crucial work.
By many measures, the US census is the government’s largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work—not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously—to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once—and only once—and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country’s most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians’ methods.
With rare insider access to the Census Bureau, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of government civil servants who made the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge—ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts—and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Boyd shows how many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what boyd calls “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements.
Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses—and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy—are precarious. Boyd’s message is clear and compelling: protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data.
Table of Contents:
Preface
1. Data Make Politics, Politics Make Data
2. Politicizing Who Counts
3. Modernizing Data Collection
4. An Out-of-Control Schedule
5. The Case of the Missing College Students
6. When Help Is Not Helpful
7. How to Anger Everyone
8. Documenting the Undocumented
9. When the Numbers Are Asked to Speak
10. Resilience in an Era of Jenga Politics
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author :
danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, where she works on topics at the intersection of technology and society. She is also the founder of the research institute Data & Society and the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.
Review :
“The US every-ten-year census of all residents both resets proportionate political representation and holds a demographic mirror in front of the population. It is a foundation stone of an informed citizenry in a democracy. boyd teaches us that the census is the product of thousands of civil servants, committed to ethical codes of impartiality, professionalism, and integrity. The book reminds us how well these patriots serve us.”
“This is the most important book about American democracy you will read this decade. danah boyd’s riveting ethnography of the US Census Bureau reveals what too few of us understand: that data are the connective tissue of the republic, the medium through which political power is allocated, resources distributed, and the nation made legible to itself. Against the backdrop of a pandemic, partisan warfare, and deliberate institutional sabotage, boyd bears witness to the unsung civil servants who held this vital American institution upright—quietly, bravely, at enormous personal cost. Urgent, honest, and impossible to put down.”
“The team behind the Census are heroes! Day in and day out, they do some of THE most important data work in the country. danah boyd documents the history, the challenges, and what we need to do to ensure our census really represents the country.”
“This book is a stark warning about the fragility of our administrative state, but also a beautiful tribute to the resilience of the civil servants who desperately try to hold the Jenga tower together while everyone else pulls at the blocks. A must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our institutions."
