Data drives politics. But politics drive data. That is to say, we make political decisions based on data, often selected from mountains of available information.

collage of census questions with title of the book Data Are Made, Not Found by Danah Boyd

How we gather data is an inherently political process and nowhere is this more clear than when the US collects information about its population, which is mandated by the Constitution every ten years. Today, we will interview Danah Boyd on her new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census. and delve into the politics of the census. [ dur:58mins. ]

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.

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Maria Armoudian, Ankine Aghassian, Anna Lapin and Sudd Dongre.

Politics and Activism, Democracy, Civil Servants, Policy making, US

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