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
But how we gather data is an inherently political decision. And nowhere is this more clear than when the US collects the information about its population. Every ten years the Constitution mandates that the government conduct a census. And this process is complicated and inherently political. That is the message of our guest today, Danah Boyd is the author of a new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US 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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