A Cover, A Code, and Lot of New Census Data
Welcome dear readers to the new newsletter!
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I'll make this one brief.
First off: Democracy's Data has a cover!
It was designed by the artist Ben Denzer. (Thanks Ben!)
You can pre-order the book here.
That cover comes with a code too, a puzzle.
The Bouk child helped me develop the code and then friend-of-this-newsletter Robin Sloan actually constructed the animation! Each frame in that gif represents a part of an important process. At the suggestion of my editor, we're offering a prize to the first person/group to solve the puzzle: you get your name printed in the book's acknowledgements!
If you want to solve it, you had better hurry, because an entire class of first-years at the University of Virginia has tackled the problem and they are close.
Today's class was going to be reverse engineering ESPN's fantasy football prediction algorithm. Instead we worked on reverse-engineering the cover of Dan's book. Probably my favorite day of teaching hands down. It got intense and there is still an email chain running! https://t.co/0KGsJXXsYW pic.twitter.com/42rum2k4rs
— John Handel (@_John_Handel) April 1, 2022
This was, honestly, the best outcome imaginable. When I first tweeted out the animation I was, um, underwhelmed by the response. But beyond the feeble tally of retweets, magic was happening. The course's professor, John Handel, told about how his students dug into the material, throwing aside all other concerns, and kept working well after class had ended. (I'm going to cajole John into writing a blog post about this with me. So stay tuned.)
Finally, today is the day that the raw records of the 1950 census are being released. I've already gone digging a bit and the U.S. National Archive's interface is surprisingly great. I highly recommend wasting a few minutes or hours tooling around...
And if you want some more words from me. I wrote short piece reflecting on this data release for the Washington Post's Made by History blog and you can read it here.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share this e-mail with your friends! And have fun out there combing through census data, thinking about how we all may or may not be preserved in the decades to come...
until next time! Dan