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danah boyd at Harvard Book Store
Past event
Featured Book
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 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.
About This Event
Harvard Book Store and Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society welcome 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. She will be joined in conversation by Yochai Benkler—Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he is faculty director of the Program on Law and Political Economy and a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Co-Sponsor
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society exists to make sense of the digital environment and ensure that it promotes human agency, dignity, and genuine connection. Learn more at cyber.harvard.edu.
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Contact Info
General Info
(617) 661-1515
info@harvard.com
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Featured Authors
danah boyd
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.
Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he is faculty director of the Program on Law and Political Economy and a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Since the 1990s, he has written about the political economy of digital technologies, focusing on how struggles over commodification or decommodification of access to the basic resources necessary for information, knowledge, and cultural production are a central determinant of freedom in twenty-first century society. His current work focuses on the institutional political economy of capitalism, combining historical and theoretical work to explain the dynamics that drive waves of innovation and productivity growth, social struggle, dislocation, and crisis in market societies. His books include The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press 2006), which won academic awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the McGannon award for social and ethical relevance in communications; Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press 2018), which in 2026 was recognized by the American Political Science Association as the best book on political communication in the last ten years, and a co-edited volume, A Political Economy of Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2022 (with D. Allen, R. Henderson, L. Downey, and J. Simons)). His forthcoming book is entitled The Global Origins of Capitalism: Power, Productivity, and the Evolution of Modern Market Societies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2027).
About the Venue
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