Hello AOIR friends! I’m sorry that I won’t get to see y’all in Mexico City this year, but I will be on a book tour. Many of you have heard me talk about the census for years. I did an in-depth ethnography of the US Census Bureau and lived to tell the tale.  “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census” tells the story of what it took for the Census Bureau to make its namesake data in 2020, amidst a pandemic, natural disasters, and political pressure. In the book, I argue that we’re living through “Jenga politics” where systems are getting torn down one plank at a time, as more pressure is being put on top. And I argue that the legitimacy of data isn’t rooted in some mythical notion of data quality, but the social fabric that surrounds a project like this. There is one very internet-specific chapter, focused on what it took for the Census Bureau to build its internet self-response system. (Oh the fun with modernization in a very constrained environment.) Anyhow, it might not be squarely an internet studies book, but I think that many of you will appreciate it nonetheless. Cuz it’s a story of democracy’s data. 

- Zoom Only! Data & Society. September 23, 1PM. Register here. w/ Dan Bouk (historian) and Janet Haven (ED of D&S)

But there’s also DC, Chapel Hill, Durham, Boston/Cambridge, Toronto, Seattle, DC again, Charlottesville, Berkeley, Mountain View, Chicago/Evanston, Ann Arbor, Boulder, NYC, New Brunswick. And more are being added. Check them out here: https://www.danah.org/data-are-made-not-found/