Data and the State

Undergraduate / Graduate

In order to regulate and govern, states must marshall data: the whos, whats, and wheres of a nation get rendered in records and statistics, at least approximately. One of the most fundamental instruments for the "datafication" of the population is a census - and the very first Article of the U.S. Constitution calls for one to be conducted every ten years. That same sentence is also the source of the notorious "Three-Fifths Compromise" establishing an enumeration rule where enslaved people count fractionally as much as free people: political arithmetic. In this course we will use Census data as a jumping-off point for an investigation of data practices of governance, looking at a host of frameworks and mechanisms to classify, measure, and locate. Students will learn to use a suite of modern packages for geospatial data science in Python, including Pandas, GeoPandas, Shapely, and Matplotlib, and readings will include texts from geography, anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies. No prior knowledge assumed.