Pondering the Slog
Hello Dear Readers,
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In this newsletter, you’ll find some book recommendations, a request or two, and updates on what I and Democracy’s Data have been up to. But first, I want to run some ideas by you about why it’s important for everyone (and not just data scientists) to get to know how data systems work, even when (especially when) the process gets ugly.
“Every census,” I write at the end of Democracy’s Data, “is a remarkable accomplishment, a glorious dream, and a serious slog.” The book’s reviewers, in the Washington Post and the New York Times both quoted from that line. I consider that a sign of the book’s success. I want readers to think a lot about the slog of the census. I want people to think about how much work goes into making official numbers. And I want them to wrestle with how messy the entire process is.
Our democracy needs us to spend a lot more time appreciating the necessary messiness of data systems.
In A Primer on Powerful Numbers, Kevin Ackermann, danah boyd, and I had some fun with a popular saying among census nerds: no one wants to see how the sausage gets made.
So, why write an entire book that forces readers to stare at the grit and gristle? Why examine examples of people ambiguously identified, of racial categories contested and unevenly applied, of people left uncounted?
Part of the answer is that it’s only by understanding a dataset’s problems that they can be lessened. That’s worth doing, even if some of these problems will probably never be entirely solved.
Another part of the answer is that it’s important to acknowledge the uncertainty embedded within powerful numbers. We might recognize, for instance, that census counts of state populations always contain errors. And then we can acknowledge that those errors often dwarf the differences between state populations that are used to justify giving a House seat to one state in favor of another. That’s a bit bonkers. We should not not automatically punish a state with a lost representative based on population differences that might well just be noise. In that situation, I think (and have argued) no state should lose a House seat, which can happen if we let the House grow as it so often has.
Finally, and I think most importantly, we need to get used to the idea that data we depend on always, at one point or another, looks like a mess. The job of the data scientist—or whoever is tasked with “cleaning” and then analyzing a dataset—is to translate that mess into usable numbers. That’s hard work. It is good work. It is necessary work. And it should be celebrated.
Self-interested doubt mongers, those who want to muddy the waters—whether to fend off regulation, fake some facts, or steal an election—will look at every messy moment in a dataset’s production as an opportunity to sow distrust. I hope that time spent pondering the “serious slog” of the census, will inoculate readers against such tactics.
When all is said and done, democracy’s data will be messy and imperfect. Democratic governance needs it nonetheless.
Speaking of good work and a healthy appreciation for the mess of humanity, can I recommend a neat little novel?
LaserWriter II is a tiny book, but its heart is huge. The novel’s hero is Claire, who finds herself apprenticed as a printer repair specialist in an “Old Reliable Macintosh Repair Shop” in the late 90s. My favorite part of the book is the way we see Claire’s love for the work and frustrations with her failures—“the worst thing in the world,” she’s told is to make a repair and then have a printer returned the following week for more repairs. The entire shop is built about doing the best job possible, not cutting corners, and delivering people the tools they need to do their work, whether that work is composing hip hop lyrics or writing a newsletter. The book is an anti-capitalist fable about business. The point is not profit. The point is doing truly “good” work and supporting the good work of others. Money changes hands, because everyone has to eat. (Indeed, Claire gets paid a living wage, with health insurance!) But money is not the point.
I read LaserWriter II when it first came out last year in hardcover.
The entire book is designed by Tamara Shopsin, who is also the author, and it is a beautiful object. Two weeks ago I listened to the audiobook, read by Shopsin, twice! First on my way from NYC to Colgate to teach, and then again on my way home.
Driving home that Thursday, it rained and rained and rained. I left in the late afternoon and autumn’s early dusk added dark to the downpour. My jaw ached all weekend, a reminder of 5 tense hours in the car. Driving through that drenching, clenching rain, LaserWriter II was my comforting companion. Together, we made it, safely.
You can read LaserWriter II now, but you’ll have to wait to get your hands on its perfect book partner: Laine Nooney’s The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. This promises to be serious history that will also be a pleasure to read, especially if a chapter titled “The Print Shop” sets off the waves of nostalgia for you that it does for me. (I am less nostalgic of having to tear the perforated treads off the sides of each piece of paper trudging out from the top of the dot matrix printer.)
Now for a request: if you’ve read Democracy’s Data, head over here to Goodreads or to Amazon and leave a rating or review. (Fun fact: you don’t have to have bought the book from Amazon to leave a review there!) Each 5 star review will make it more likely that more of your fellow citizens will be comfortable with messy data.
If you leave a rating or review and let me know about it, I’ll send you a signed, personalized, and census-stamped bookplate!
(Fun fact: even if you don’t leave a rating or review, you can reply to this e-mail with an address and I’ll send you a signed, stamped bookplate!)
Speaking of signing books, yesterday I dropped into Book Culture at West 112th, near Columbia University, and defaced a couple copies of Democracy’s Data.
It was fun.
While I was there, I saw this wonderful pairing: Danielle Citron’s The Fight for Privacy and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. I’ve read both and they each get my highest recommendation.
Citron makes a case for “intimate privacy” in a book that provides a clear picture of how data about us moves through the world for the profit of others. It is, at times, terrifying, but at least Citron is there to guide us through.
Beaton is the cartoonist behind “Hark, a Vagrant,” a favorite of historians. This is my favorite strip, perfect for a methods seminar. In Ducks, Beaton tells her own story from years ago of heading out west to work in camps extracting fossil fuels so she could pay off her student loan debts. She brings to life a toxic environment—a place where good work feels impossible—in an accounting that teems simultaneously with empathy and anger.
Be warned, though: for both books, once I picked them up, I had trouble putting them down.
And speaking of fortuitous book pairings, Orly Lobel snapped this photo of her new book The Equality Machine next to mine at the Harvard Coop.
Coming Up!
This Wednesday at 7pm EDT, I’ll be running an online workshop with Humanities New York on “Data and Democracy”:
When we hear the word “data,” we may think about today’s tech giants: the companies who gather information as they deliver goods to our doors or present personalized ads on our timelines. But data has been with us for hundreds of years; the gathering of data has been central to democratic governance since the dawning of the American nation-state. In this session, Dan Bouk, author of Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, will discuss the U.S. census and how it represents us and our communities. Participants are invited to dig into historical census records and consider this crucial national infrastructure in new ways. This conversation can be used as a model for others to host discussions that empower participants to sift through data and think critically about how it’s used.
Tune in on YouTube on Thursday at 12:15pm, when I get to talk Democracy’s Data on the Majority Report with Sam Seder.
And In Case You Missed It
-Check out this “Doc Chat” hosted by Julie Golia at the New York Public Library. We examined some “partner” census sheets together as part of this wonderful series that is particularly aimed at providing resources for teachers. As a fun bonus, my friend Kendra Smith-Howard attended with her entire senior seminar and they asked a question!
-And watch this terrific conversation with three leading librarians who specialize in genealogy. Thanks to the National Archives, I got to play host and ask questions about how family history researchers can find deeper meaning using census records. Watch me with Elizabeth Hodges, Phil Sutton, and Bob Timmermann here.
Believe it or not, I have more to say and more books to recommend. Expect another newsletter in coming weeks!
In the meantime, take care all!
Dan