Danah Boyd at Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Harvard Book Store welcomes danah boyd —Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University and founder of the research institute Data & Society—for a discussion of her new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census . About Data Are Made, Not Found 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…