Town Hall Presents

By any metric, a lot was going on in 2020, and looking back at it now, the census may have seemed like a fairly brief blip. Behind the scenes, however, the 2020 census was more than a decade in the making. Implementing phone and online responses for the first time and navigating countless real-time developments, this iteration required nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers to collect data about the American public. Data that would in turn be used to help determine years of federal funding and political power. In many ways, the US census is one of the government’s largest non-wartime operations and the world’s oldest, biggest data-making endeavors – and researcher and educator danah boyd has dug deep into how 2020’s census was like none that had come before it.

In her newest book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, boyd explores what it really took for the 2020 Census Bureau to pull it all off. With rare insider access to the Census Bureau itself, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of the civil servants involved. By documenting these first-hand perspectives, Data Are Made, Not Found provides an insightful glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. Amidst a global pandemic, natural disasters, and political forces that laid hurdles for budget, schedule, and even the statisticians’ methods themselves, 2020 proved an unprecedented effort. Each chapter of Data Are Made, Not Found aims to reveal a different challenge – ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the unwittingly counterproductive help of well-intended stakeholders attempting to avoid undercounts – and shows how civil servants responded to each problem and controversy.

boyd calls many of these challenges the Census Bureau faced in 2020 the result of “Jenga politics.” She posits that decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders getting strategically involved weakened the administrative state for short-term political gains. Data Are Made, Not Found argues that civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses – and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy – are still precarious. boyd argues that protecting democracy must include protection for the institutions and the working people that produce this data.

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