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For this episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed historian Dr. Dan Bouk. Here’s the bio from his website: “Dan Bouk researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. He studied computational mathematics as an undergraduate at Michigan State, before earning a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. His work investigates the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. His first book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago, 2015), explored the spread into ordinary Americans’ lives of the United States life insurance industry’s methods for quantifying people, for discriminating by race, for justifying inequality, and for thinking statistically. His new book, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them was published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August 2022. Bouk blogs about his on-going research at shroudedincloaksofboringness.com.”
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
- Find Dan Bouk on Twitter, @DanBouk
- Dan’s friend Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough
- Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
- Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat and The Need
- Documentary filmmaker Penny Lane
- The New York Times review of Democracy’s Data by Alexandra Jacobs
- censusstories.us, Dan’s original project blog
- David McCullough on Thornton Wilder and writing, in the Paris Review
- Historian Joanna Radin
- Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club
- Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
- Data & Society Research Institute
- Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance
- Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry
- Ethnographer danah boyd, Bouk’s collaborator at Data & Society
- Jesse Ball, The Census
TRANSCRIPT (EDITED VERSION COMING SOON)
Dan Bouk 0:01
What I try to do throughout the book, the thing is the most concrete strategy I have throughout the book is to hold on to my own capacity for wonder that I can find something not just that is surprising, but I can find people who are alive and doing their own weird things in the past, and let them keep doing that thing.
Kate Carpenter 0:28
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. And I’m your host Kate Carpenter. This week, I am delighted to share my conversation with historian Dan Bouk.
Dan Bouk 0:39
Thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:40
Dr. Bouk is an associate professor of history at Colgate University and the author of two books. The first book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual came out in 2015, with the University of Chicago Press. His newest book, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them, was published just last week, and it’s getting some great buzz. A New York Times book review just called it endearingly nerdy. To find out more about how he wrote a page turning book about the census, of all things, and much more about his writing process, please enjoy this conversation with Dan Bouk.
Dan Bouk 1:21
I remember distinctly sitting in a high school English class, speaking to a beloved teacher, and telling her in all earnestness that I was going to college to study science so that I could never have to write an essay ever again. And she said to me, are you sure that’s wise? And I said, Yes. I’m very certain. I don’t know what happened. Exactly. I mean, I do know what happened. I went to college, I studied computational mathematics. It was the the science that had the fewest requirements of all of the sciences. And then I ended up filling up all my other requirements with philosophy and a course on Shakespeare, where we read 20 plays, and then just actually only a handful history classes, but very influential history classes. And it turned out I liked writing when, when I was in control of it, I guess. So that’s the that’s the beginning of the trajectory.
Kate Carpenter 2:18
You went to grad school, obviously, for history, did you have an approach to history and writing when you arrived? Or did that evolve?
Dan Bouk 2:27
I suppose I, the thing I like about history, I have a number of friends who are novelists. And I love reading novelists. If you are a novelist, listening to this, and you’d love to be my friend, I love reading novels and progress. I’ll put that out as an advertisement. But one of the reasons I don’t believe I could ever be a novelist is because of how terrifying it is to have no anchor to have to, to imagine this whole world into existence. And as a writer, the thing that I am deeply grounded writer, I always start from the details or the evidence and build out a as a result, I’m not as good at writing arguments, or I have to come to my arguments through other sorts of means. But so from the very beginning, I would find a source or a voice or a line that I found interesting, and I would build from it around and explore with it. And so that that was I remember writing a philosophy paper in which was supposed to make an argument as a first year in undergraduate at Michigan State. And I went into the library found a bunch of sermons delivered during the American Revolution, and use them to make arguments about how wars might be considered just by Christian faith. This was not what the assignment was. This was how I knew to make a claim was to first find other people making claims, and put it together my um, that I took a course in American intellectual history with David Bailey, to whom my new book is, it’s in memory of him. He introduced me to William James. And in William James, I found a kindred spirit and a many, many different ways, but one way as a writer, because James basically just strings together other people’s texts in a creative and illuminating fashion that then bring out from them things that you might not otherwise expect. But he’s a collage just in all kinds of certain ways. Well, I’m not nearly so what today’s genres don’t allow that sort of writing in spirit. I think that’s kind of the practice I brought to my own work.
Kate Carpenter 4:39
Let’s start just by talking about the nuts and bolts of how you work. What is your research process like and how do you organize sources?
Dan Bouk 4:47
I mean, it varies a little bit changes over time for this most recent project. A lot of my sources were online through ancestry through the National Archives. I was directly there, their services were those were those were at that point quite a bit slower than ancestry was a because working through census records. And so in that case, I would just spend a lot of time looking through old the, in this case, digitized versions of microphotographs of old sheets that I would I would piece through. But then a lot of the work also involves doing stuff in the National Archives. And there, those, those were great trips, I would drive down to DC or take a train down to DC or take a bus down to DC from New York, I would stay in a hostel because I find hotels alienating. And then I would walk about three miles everyday down to the National Archives. From the moment it opens until the moment it closes, I just stood in one place with a, you know, a large camera and took pictures, every I take a picture of the box, I take a picture of each folder, so that I know where I am, I keep a Word document open and I write down the name of the box, the name of the folder I tried to as I go, kind of create full citations for each of my archival sources, or each of each of the folders at least as I go. And then within them, at that point isn’t taking photos, usually I just write a quick note to myself, like took a bunch of photos, talk about this, this, this this. And then when I get home to the every evening to the hospital, I download all those photos, I print them into a PDF. And then over the course of the ensuing months, as I work through them, that Word document, I start to put image numbers next to each of the different places that I’ve already filled in so that I know where each section where each box, each folder begins in that PDF for them. So I can go back and forth through them over and over.
Kate Carpenter 6:42
At what point in your research process do you start writing?
Diane Engles 6:46
Really early? I mean, it varies a little bit from each project for in this case, I began to gather these materials. I had written one book, I wondered if I could write a second book I assumed I could can’t tell until you do it. And I I felt like I needed an extra nudge to start working through this material. I knew I wanted to write about at that point, the 1940 census. But that can mean a lot of things. And so I rather than having to lock myself into anything to begin with, I decided I would just start writing about interesting sources. This is a pattern that I’m finding and look for stories and try to build out from there and see what I discover. And so I decided, Well, this sounds like a blog. So I should just start a blog. And indeed, I started a blog called census stories.us. And it was so useful, not just because it gave me a reason to work through material, although it did that. But it gave me an audience. Not a big one. But a good audience of people who would reliably read this occasionally send me questions or notes, or even just, you know, when I could see on my little Google counter that somebody else had read it, I was like, Oh, somebody’s reading this, there’s a reason to continue. And that thrill would then drive me forward through the next story. But I’ve got to get another one up there so that I can get that that high of another set of readers going through and looking at this piece. And over time I started to to develop a sense of what this project will look like. And I think also importantly, I started to figure out what I thought the voice for the project should be because I’d had all of these different moments to experiment and figure out how I wanted to write about census.
Kate Carpenter 8:29
Did you worry at all? Or did you encounter any concern about writing on your blog versus then writing a book project?
Dan Bouk 8:38
Yeah, I thought about that. There’s two reasons I can give for why I went ahead with it the way I did. One was I already had tenure. And so if for whatever reason, it didn’t turn into a book, it didn’t work out, somebody wouldn’t let me do something. Because already given away all the good material, I didn’t have a lot to lose. With that said, I still actually think that probably a lot of people can could get away with this. And in fact, it has more than anything else been an advantage. The blog served as a as evidence for my publishers that there were people out there who wanted to read this from it. And from those readers, I had evidence that an audience existed, I had people saying, this is surprisingly interesting, that I could then share and show people so so in that sense, I don’t think that concern was necessarily there. And then the second factor was, I’m writing modern US history. And it’s really important to acknowledge that the market for modern US history is much more forgiving and much larger than many of my fellow historians. And so it allows me to get away with stuff that I just don’t know if other people if people in other fields would be able to get away with.
Kate Carpenter 9:58
I want to– I have a lot more questions about the process of publishing this book, but I want to come back and keep asking first about, you know, what is your revision process look like if you as you start, especially writing early,
Dan Bouk 10:09
I write to figure out things. Writing is for me, this is appropriate, I guess because he recently died. David McCullough came to Michigan State when I was a first year to give a big address. He was introduced by David Bailey, which is how I found out that Bailey existed and he became then my first mentor. And McCullough has told the story, which he’s told many, many times before about taking courses with Thornton Wilder, and how Wilder would explain to students that writing is thinking clearly. And that struck first year me and it strikes much older me now still. So I keep trying to keep a journal in my computer, it’s called thinking clearly. And it’s the place where I write and in writing for me is that that thing that I do when I want to work out ideas, it is, like I’ve been, I’ve had to talk to too many people, or I’ve been taking care of the child or doing too many things for too long, I go and write because that is the place I get to be alone and just think with my own thoughts and work things out. And so the result my because of that relationship to writing each of my drafts, each time I working on working on a chapter or a piece, I often just start from scratch, I will, I’ll write through once, organize all of my evidence and ideas that one time through. And then I’ll open up a new document for this book, because I was writing it first as a blog, because I needed an escape from Microsoft Word, and that there’s the feelings I had up on Microsoft Word, I was working in a text editor. Right, right and markdown, Adam, and I would open up a new sheet. And I would just start writing again, from scratch. And occasionally I would borrow some materials. And I would certainly scavenge quotes, and it’s given sources. And as I as I would be writing a first draft, I would write a sentence. And then instead of footnotes, because I’ve already marked down, I would write a comment, a comment section, I would put in there the citation. But then also, I would often just like type out long sets of notes from the source that I was working on. So then I could go and harvest from those materials that I could draw in later versions. But then so then the second time through, I start from scratch, I have now a better sense of what I think the story is about. And I go through it. And they often go through a number of drafts, depressingly large number probably a depressingly large number for each chapter or section.
Kate Carpenter 12:24
Are there other people you rely on for feedback as you’re writing?
Dan Bouk 12:27
Oh, yes. Well, I mean, like I say, at one level, everybody, because I put on the internet, and I and I hope lots and lots of people will respond. One chapter I have a chapter about the concept of the partner, the idea of the partner. And that in arose entirely from a question that one of my readers posed Ansley Erickson at Teachers College, to whom I will be forever grateful. And so that was the case there. And then when when I got to be a little bit further on, I had, I guess, I mean, early in the stages, I have other readers too. I’ve had people who I share address with as I go along, I have people I talk on the phone with so early in the process, I was talking with Joanna Radin, who’s a historian of science, and a friend of mine who writes about the history of data in really powerful ways thinking about how people are, and their histories are told and data sources. And she and I we spent a lot of time just kind of talking through things and, and a lot of her sensibilities and her ways of seeing the world are, I think reflected in the way the book turned out. In this whole process. One thing that I think is important, this book couldn’t be written if I didn’t have my history lab. So in this case, this is I would COVID Give me because me a little bit of funds to hire student researchers. I learned a number of years ago that I seldom could come up with enough work or the right kind of work to keep one person busy for that number of hours that they would allow me to hire somebody. And I also found out that I was lonely, desperately lonely As historian. And I like back in the days when I was a scientist, and I got to work in labs. And so I decided to create a history lab where I would just basically hire three or four students. And we would all meet once or twice a week, in our meetings together, we just kind of work things out. It’s fun. We we look at a source together that somebody has found and try to interpret the handwriting together. It’s a place for me to be able to teach somebody how to think like a historian and graduate students. But beyond that, it was incredibly useful because I can’t look through all of these census records on my own. And so when, for instance, I went to Dartmouth and found 1000s and 1000s of letters written to a senator by people who are complaining about an income question in the census. I could then come back. My history lab helps me put together a spreadsheet in which we name everybody who wrote a letter not everybody, but a awful lot of people who wrote a letter to the senator. And then they work with me to see if we can find those people in the census records. And then from there, we can figure out if and Have those people said anything interesting. And then like Emily Kara, which was one of my books, my history lab, and she realized that there was one group of letters that seemed to be together that were kind of weird. And, and that she helped find all of them. And then we realized, wait a second, they all like worked in the poor office in, they all worked in the welfare office, basically. And they’re all complaining about how it’s degrading to have somebody know how much income you make. And it’s like, oh, well, that’s an interesting, right, they wouldn’t know. And I wouldn’t have probably figured that out if it hadn’t been Emily, putting those pieces together. And there’s a lot of places in the book there, where it’s only because I was able to have this whole collective effort that the, this became possible. So I like people, I work through ideas with people I occasionally share drafts with. And then once I had a full manuscript, I sent a version to my editor. But I also printed out and bound at Staples, 10, or 12, or 14 copies of the whole manuscript. And I was with a trade press. So they didn’t have a formal peer review process. So I sent some to some scholars in the field who I hoped would be willing to read it and give me feedback. And then I also picked a number of people who weren’t scholars in the field. Some were scholars, some were not scarless that people I had already worked with previously, who I really liked and really respected. And I just asked them if they’d be willing to read it, I did, I offered them a not particularly large reading fee. And I say, give him a copy of the book when was done. And I just asked that they read it and that they mark, this is something I learned from my friend, Robin Stone novelist that I often just kind of thought they were going to mark in the margins, places where they got bored, or places where they lost interest or things they thought were really interesting, special. I mean, it’s very nice to have positive feedback to, and they could give me more general comments, but at some ways just to kind of like read through and just, you know, kind of like the knobs that you turn when you’re watching a show. And those focus groups like you just kind of go through and tell me what’s working, what’s not working. And then just, here’s an envelope, ship it back to me, alright, we’ll have a conversation, or we’ll meet somewhere and talk about it. And so on, then I had a lot of people who read the whole manuscript, and that was, I mean, it’s really useful. I, my default ones might tells me something is often to think that they’re not right. I mean, and then very quickly, I realized, oh, no, they actually, they actually are right. But I think I think it’s a kind of a useful default, because it means a little bit of resistance is there. But then when you have 14, people telling you fairly similar things are actually more even more interesting 14 people telling you slightly different things, to figure out, oh, this is why when that person said this, and this person said that, it’s not that I don’t have to do it, this person wanted me to do, I can do what a person wants me to do, and also what’s the other person wants me to do. Or I can do a third thing, which is actually the solution to all of these problems. And so I find it really, really, really useful to be able to triangulate a lot of different feedback.
Kate Carpenter 18:01
Love that you ask readers to mark where they get bored, which I think my undergrad was in journalism, that’s like a not unusual sort of way to read something. At what point would someone put down the magazine or the newspaper? It’s not something that historians usually talk about, I think often when they’re reading, you know, they talk about like, is the argument confusing? Or that sort of thing, but not like, where did you get bored? And you have often sort of described yourself as someone who makes boring things less less boring, who makes things interesting? How did that become such a focus for you?
Dan Bouk 18:37
I like it. When we were talking earlier, you mentioned this is my brand, and it’s entirely right. That’s that is my brand. Obviously, the one thing right, I got that. There’s a genealogy to that technique that goes exactly as you anticipated. Right. My friend Robin Sloan and I, we both went to Michigan State together, he went off and did a internship, he studied economics, went off and did an internship at Poynter and so was trained by journalists in thinking about how to read and so he came back then to me with the you know, the, the gold coins all the way through, and this is how you do this, how you how you do reading of things. And he asked me to do this with his manuscripts. And I stole it from him and introduces mine. So it’s true. I didn’t pick that that particular method up from historians, but it is good to want readers to keep reading. So I think it’s I think it is a it’s a valuable technique. I don’t know about the boring thing. I am attracted to topics that people often find to be boring. Some amount of that I think has to do with a certain level of cowardice on my part that when one picks interesting things, the stakes are high. Like a lot of people have already written about this a lot. It’s it’s expected. They’re often highly contentious. When you start with something that no one cares about. The field is open. People don’t have strong feelings about it in the first place. The bar is so low, it’s so like If you’re you’re ready to be excited and entertained, it’s like it’s a different move to take something that’s where people say like, I think that that could possibly have a story at it and say, oh, there’s a story in it. And that that buys you something with your readers, it gives you a moment to, to get them to be excited about a discovery, and discovery hidden in plain sight. And I suppose the other thing to say is, I also just think it’s important when I, when I left undergraduate and was trying to think about what to do, I was teaching with America, I was reading a lot of books about writing. And for a brief moment there, I thought, oh, yeah, what I want to do is just write about trying to interview people build sewers, and I want to find out what it’s like to build a sewer. And it was I was reading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, which recently came out there and was in the footnotes there, that I found a reference to Ted Porter, and discovered that the history of statistics existed, that sounded very boring, and also, like something that was really influential in the modern world, but that I thought it might have some stories behind it. And so I was I was kind of led in that direction. And then people told me basically, what my brand was, I would be in our program seminar at Princeton was a graduate student writing about mosquito eradication. And somebody would say, this was not as boring as I thought I was going to be. And that is, by far the most common comment I’ve ever gotten in my career. And so that’s, you know, I just embraced it.
Kate Carpenter 21:33
It sounds like you know, your first book arose out of your dissertation. But it sounds like this sort of focus on writing, writing or really engaging way has always been there. Did your writing process change from your first and second books?
Dan Bouk 21:46
Yes, yes. A great deal, I would say. Well, I mean, the first book, there were different kinds of pressures. But also there was a distinctly a different audience, I had written a dissertation. I then turned it into a book. A true to form, it took me a long time to try and do a book, in part because almost none of the dissertation, like none of the sentences in the dissertation showed up in the book, because I’m not capable of just revising, I not written it that way. And that’s just ends the way I read things, have very dear friends who were able to do it differently. They wrote dissertations that wrote, read like books and turn them seamlessly into books and did a wonderful job with it. That was not me. But I also I just thought of I was writing for federal scholars, mainly, I dreamed, of course, other people who would read it, but I wasn’t counting on that. And I also, I that I did then and I still now thought of myself as an artist, as much as a scholar. My my partner’s opera singer disagrees with me about this. But we, that’s a fight for home, not for the radio, the podcast, but I thought of myself as an artist. And so each of the chapters in my first book, I thought it was kind of experimental, I have one chapter that’s built around a Charles Ives pamphlet. And so I wrote it as a kind of symphonic set a series in which each of the chapters weaves together three different themes. Very difficult to read, I mean, really, like not a nice strategy in terms of keeping readers around. Like, certainly there are much more straightforward pads to tell the story that I told, I had a great deal of fun doing it, I have a chapter built around five images that I then use to tell a story as we follow the treadmill through a bureaucratic adventure in New York Life Insurance Company. These were for me, experiments, really experiments in writing and thinking about storytelling and thinking about history. And not surprisingly, as a result, this book has had a good number of readers but fewer readers, it ended up having a lot more readers than I expected in some ways, because I didn’t know that this whole new field of critical data studies of studies of algorithms was about to emerge just the same moment that I was writing this book. And so it’s found those folks who found this book and found it more useful than in ways that didn’t suspect. But again, had I been smarter and realized they were there, I could have actually addressed them more directly in the book in the historiography and the introduction. So so that was the process for this first book for the second book. I had a different sense of the audience. I wanted to from the get go figure out a way to tell the story that would make it inviting to a lot of different readers, and it’s still in its own way experimental but not experimental in a way that would make it difficult.
Kate Carpenter 24:43
To understand exactly how he did this. I asked Dan to talk me through a passage from his new book. Here’s Dan Bouk, reading from the very beginning of Democracy’s Data.
Diane Engles 24:54
There are stories in the data. You just have to know how to read them. Imagine a table of Numbers column after column of digits and decimals gleaming with precision, ornamented only by an aura of objectivity. This is data to be sure. Now loosen the hole that image of data has on us less than some other visions or data might be manifested. Think of a form to be filled in on paper or a screen, intended to gather information that can later be quantified. That form is like a street corner, a conference room, a transit hub, people and institutions meet on that form. Someone somewhere designed that form deciding on the set of questions to be asked with the spaces to be left blank. Maybe they also listed some possible answers or limited acceptable responses. You then encounter this design environment as you hunch over the form, or maybe instead of questionnaire brings the form to the threshold of your home to your doorstep. The questioner then tackles the difficult task of fitting the unruly reality of your life within the forms straight rule blinds. The final resulting form in all that is written upon it as well as all the negotiations that shaped it, whether backstage or off screen, so to speak. All of this is data to the data behind the numbers.
Kate Carpenter 26:25
I asked you in part about this passage, as I told you before this conversation, because I am interested in the fact that this this passage is not how historians often write. There’s no sort of direct evidence here. Although of course, lots of research goes into this. There’s not really a clear argument immediately. It’s it’s very lyrical, and it invites the reader in, talk to me a little bit about how you decided to start this way and what it takes to write a passage like this.
Unknown Speaker 26:55
So this particular passage as the first line that books, as often the case came very late, the very, very end of the of the process, as I was deciding amongst a number of possible audiences or centers for the book write it, it was sprawled in a number of ways. So my, my former graduate advisor, Dan Rogers was kind enough to read the book. And I remember sitting with him on a bench and saying, you kind of have to decide what kind of book this is going to be. As I had begun writing it, I had started off in part with the advice of my editor, Sean MacDonald, who said, you know, you’ve read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, right? Like, yeah, think about that. And I look back at it again. And it’s like, oh, yeah, this is really, this feels like this is a book about a map, right about a color map. But in fact, it’s really about cities, and about how cities organized and how knowledge works within the city. And that I thought, oh, yeah, this is what I’m, you know, I’m reading a book about the sentences but not really reading a book about just the sentences I want to figure out. How do we know what we know about a nation? And how do people? How do people fit themselves within the categories and the ways of knowing that states allow them. And so I knew from the get go, that that was kind of what I was doing. But then I you write a book, and you’re grounded validly sources, and it takes you in all kinds of different directions, and then you have to wrestle it into place at the very end. And so this was my attempt, at least, to bring it back for myself and for others, the basically, the beginning of almost each chapter was rewritten that point in a way to try to help draw that theme back in that what this book is ultimately about is not just a story about the census, not a story primarily for historians. But for people who have had the experience or who live in a world in which they have to explain themselves to a data system. And this is a book for them to think about what that process means, where it comes from, how we live and work and protest and engage within that kind of system.
Kate Carpenter 29:10
You’re writing this so I want to say Invitational in this book in this in this opening, but then throughout you often speak to the reader and ask them to come along with you in a sense, I was struck, especially that there are a number of images included in this book, where you’ve assembled. Clips from the census are different parts of the census. And you are in many ways, teaching the reader to read it alongside of you. Was that an approach that you knew was going to be part of the book going in or did that emerge as you wrote?
Dan Bouk 29:42
I think it was there. I remember distinctly about midway through the process of writing the book I had taken what turned into a two year leave from Colgate to join the Data and Society Research Institute which is a think tank that was at that point, situated in midtown Manhattan, it now lives on the internet, like many places do. And so I would commute from northern Manhattan where I live. And I would be wandering down by the, by the flat iron by the old metropolitan tower. And I would look at these buildings. And when I when I look at these buildings, which have like a very grid like structure, so they feel very data II to me in the first place, they represent on their exteriors, the same kind of aesthetic as a punch card. But when I looked at them, when I thought about was this book I read by Carol Willis, called Form Follows Finance, in which she explains how it is the architectural structures of these buildings were determined in really important ways, by financial considerations in terms of how they would be ultimately rented to to folks in the future. I thought there was so much more beautiful because I knew this, like the what a building I was already attracted to suddenly gained even more, a lower and became even more aesthetically pleasing, precisely because I knew more about it. And I’d had this experience before, when I read Baxandall’s book about 14th century art, which I’m the title is escaping me. When as an undergraduate, I’d read Robert Pinsky on poetry, the sounds of poetry, these forms that I knew I liked, are in poetry, and I liked it. But I came to like it became suddenly alive to me, because somebody had helped me figure out a different way of seeing them. And so I was from the from the beginning thinking, well, maybe this book could be about reading data. And the census is a, an, a shared text. That’s attractive, because it’s available because it from 1940 on and now from 1950, back, all of the records about individuals are are digitized and made available to the national government that is attractive, because people already read it. There are millions of people who do family history and genealogy who already rely on these records. And what if I work with those people and I buy the new readers and we all think together that what we’re doing when we look at these materials is reading data. And so in that kind of conspiratorial sense to think about this as expanding the ambit of people who can be data people beyond just those who the quants, who normally think belong in such spaces.
Kate Carpenter 32:38
I mentioned this before, but I’m going to quote it to you now and see if I can make you blush. But Kirkus called Democracy’s Data a “page turner;” Booklist talked about how fun it was. And these are not necessarily even words that often apply to histories, let alone a history of the census or histories of data. Do you have concrete strategies that you use when you write, to make to make your work page turning and fun?
Dan Bouk 33:03
That’s a great question. I have a complicated relationship with this Booklist one, MCD has, has like, pulled me to pull quote from it. And in the end, it says genealogists history lovers, and anyone interested in how government works will find this a fun and revealing history of how politics, racism and bias affects the census. Now fun, and politics racism and bias don’t belong in like, neighboring clauses. And so, so I so I kind of I read that I think, oh, no, what I do. And so like, I tried to think what do they mean, when they say fun there? And I don’t know, of course I didn’t. Who knows what they said what they mean? What I think they mean, though, is not that I’ve shown them a way in which to something fun or funny about bias or racism, or even that those sections are particularly fun to read. But what I try to do throughout the book, the thing is, the most concrete strategy I have throughout the book, is to hold on to my own capacity for wonder that I can find something not just that is surprising, but they can find people who are alive and doing their own weird things in the past, and let them keep doing that thing, even amidst this world and the story in which some really terrible stuff is happening. And so I think that’s a lot of what that means to call it fun is that I, I can I can be I have a chapter called silences and white supremacy. And it closes though, in part by thinking about this mother and her son, the mother who works for the federal government in Washington DC, the son who is a census enumerator who’s trained as an architectural draftsman and I talked about how wonderful his handwriting is because it looks like an architectural draftsman wrote this stuff and I hope that what that detail does is it brings to life Have a little bit of sense of like, alright, yeah, look at these people live in, look at them doing their thing, even though right? It’s also noting that they’re not represented in the government that they don’t have a congressional representative in Washington, DC, Washington, DC, listeners might note still doesn’t have senators or full representation in the government despite having an awful lot of people, which is something that maybe the United States government might consider changing, and people might consider changing. So I mean, that’s, that’s kind of one way I approached this. But I omit you asked me this question, or you mentioned this question to me ahead of time. And I was thinking, Oh, no. What do I do? Like, how do I do this? If you’re me, I was kind of just glancing through the book to figure out what did I do? And so here’s one piece, this is from a chapter called names and negotiations early on, and I’m talking about a investigation in California. And it’s, as those supervisors were charged with hiring and managing the teams of enumerators who conducted the counts within their enumeration districts, one of the assistant supervisors in Los Angeles, California district was named Well, actually, I won’t give him a name just yet. Because his name, or more precisely, His names, became a question of some importance in the context of a larger political strategy, or controversy. And the story of his name, or names, speaks to the nature of names as they get recorded as data. And so I mean, I guess like one of the things that I’m doing pretty consistently, one of the reasons I was drawn to this is there are a lot of mysteries and mysteries can be frustrating for historian because you want to know how things happen. But most of what we most of our sources are chock full of mysteries and mystery can also be a source of narrative drive. And so I often the thing I most frequently try to do is take things where if I don’t get to know the answer, I start with that question. I tried to discover the answer. And then I tell the story of as much as the answer as I could find. And then to use what remaining mystery there is, as a tool to build suspense, or a means to try to encourage the reader to want to know, I wonder what happens next. And so I hope that that’s kind of why it feels like there’s a sense that this is a page term, because there’s important questions are being raised, and you feel like, you want to keep going to figure out how the story is going to end.
Kate Carpenter 37:17
It’s interesting, because you You seem to hold on then to the sense of surprise and curiosity that you have, when you first encounter that archive. You know, I think sometimes as historians once we’ve done the research, we can forget how how foreign things seem to us, when we first arrived at the archive, you know, all the questions that we had, and you you really have made sure not to lose track of that, then when you turn to the writing that you remember the kinds of questions the readers might have, because you had those questions, too.
Dan Bouk 37:46
I wonder if that’s how it is. I mean, just I don’t want listeners to get the wrong impression. I’m exactly that historian friend who wanders around, well, actually everything and pouring cold water on all fun conversations. So it does, it must be a practice of work, it must be something that I’m cultivating in writing to try to bring out that sense of wonder, because it escapes me constantly in my actual life. But it is it is a I mentioned earlier, my kind of James Ian influences. And that is important to me. It’s also it runs through the tradition of being a social historian or thinking of social history. It runs through the all kinds of traditions that the kinds of folks who I’m reading, whether it’s in technology studies, something like someone like Ruha Benjamin talking about race critical coast to coast studies, or, or whether it’s like I would every day at the National Archives, or everyday, many days after the archives have walked first, before I went home, I would walk over to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. And I would look at this 1934 painting by Leif already called subway, in which he captures in a train in New York City, a train with just this melange of people living their lives. And and that that was for me, I kind of told them what I wanted the book to be as well, a look at what how do you picture a diverse America and honestly, and openly capture the dignity of all of these individuals, even when you’re dealing with a source in which dignity is not the first priority necessarily, of all of the people who are doing this enumeration? I wouldn’t like 8 million directions in that answer. But that’s the only way that I can do that thing, I guess of holding on to the Wonder is I got a number of ethical and aesthetic commitments. And I just tried to remind myself of those and expose myself to those so that then when I’m in the sources, they drive me in the way I tell the story.
Kate Carpenter 39:44
I want to turn to talking a little bit about publishing and your publishing process in this book. In the acknowledgments you mentioned your agent. And I think you said even jotted down that that they found you helped you imagine this book and then guided you through the process of writing it. So I’m curious to know kind of just the the process of coming up with this book of selling it, and how that went.
Dan Bouk 40:08
I was quoted in the New York Times in, I don’t know 2015 2016. But something totally different about something that had to do with life insurance and though the sale of policy policies on enslaved people, and so Jane von Mehren from Aevitas Creative, read that story, emailed me and said, Hey, do you anything interesting going on? I said, I don’t know. And so we went, and we met in her office. And we talked for about an hour about a project I was working on, I was at that point, working on a book. And it was in some way about kind of the baby boom, and about how we think about what the baby boom is, and about demographic research and these sort of things. And we talked about for a while. And then she and I both agreed that like it was not a trade book, whatever it was, we didn’t really know what it was, but it was not the right thing. And so we parted amicably and said, see later. And then I think a couple years later, I was working on I was writing this blog, and I had started, I had written a few, by that point, a number of stories. And I started to see readers respond to it and be interested in it. I said, maybe this, maybe this is it. And so then I emailed Jane said, Hey, I’ve been doing this thing. And she said, Yeah, I saw that. Let’s talk about it. And I mean, I’m enormous ly lucky, because then Jane spent a lot of time with me, she gave me models of trade book proposals, which which are a different form than the proposal that I learned to do as an academic doing? Many university presses also sell trade books, I want to be careful, but to get in the language, but like, the academic monograph that I had written in the in the past, that kind of proposal was a very different kind of beast, this one was much more like, almost like a condensed version of the entire book that I was writing 100 pages or so that really gave a full sense of the like, the tone and the voice and the ARC of this book. And then Jane, I mean, she invested a lot in me, she like we would meet, she would give me deadlines, we’d meet every few weeks. And then she would read ahead of time when I would done and tell me where I had grasped this genre and where I had not grasped the genre. And, and as a result, we worked, we eventually worked it out. And she finally said, like, I think this might be a thing. And so we sent it out to a whole bunch of different places, and crossed our fingers. Now, in this case, it landed MCD for a number of reasons, but I’m sure it did not hurt that like I’ve mentioned him a number of times, but my friend Robin Sloan, publishes MCD. And he sent a nice note saying, you can look at this. And I don’t I think it’s probably also both honest and important to acknowledge that it doesn’t hurt to have connections in the publishing world in general. My my first book, I got a concrete contract, in part because I was talking to somebody at a conference and said, I really like to post the Chicago and they said, Oh, I’ll tell somebody about that. And then Chicago called me I mean, so there’s a, there’s an honest way to play the game, maybe. But I think everybody relies on connections whenever possible. And it’s part of the game is to figure out how to how to how to talk to people show what you’re doing, and get people excited, and then get build a team build a team together, people who want to bring something out into the world,
Kate Carpenter 43:22
What was it like to work with the trade press on this book,
Dan Bouk 43:26
it was so luxurious. I mean, what I what I mean is, there’s, there’s just a lot of people who are invested in making this book Good. And there’s a lot of money that they have, that they can apply to that process of making it making it good. So I had a great copy editor. I mean, the process of the copy editing, it didn’t feel great all the time, because we were arguing about things but the but it was a great copy editor. And then at the proof stage when we had proofs, I did the proofs myself, but then numerous other people were hired to read the proofs of my book. And they caught lots of things that I otherwise wouldn’t have caught right like this is that you get you occasionally read book reviews in journals in which people say the press really should have done a better job proof proving this book and I’ve always thought that was kind of silly because we all know that authors do other proof in that maybe back in the day, there was a time in which presses had the funds in which they were capable to hire to do this thing I can say now that it’s Wow, is it cool to have people there doing the support work and doing this proofing and it gives you a sense of why and how trade books end up looking so clean so often is because like it’s just a lot of energy and effort people put into this. My my editor key read the entire manuscript and gave me not line edits really, but but kind of big, a very long, big set of comments about like, the whole structure that then I could take could triangulate and work with. They’re very smart through with these other comments, but not only him his assistant also read the entire manuscript. And she gave me these great comments along the way, right? Like, it’s just, that’s why it’s luxurious. It was really pretty cool to realize that all these people were were working to make this book good.
Kate Carpenter 45:12
Well, I want to ask before I let you go, you’ve mentioned a few people on the way. But are there other writers that you read and look to for inspiration or other genres for that matter?
Dan Bouk 45:21
I mean, so many people, I mean, one person I should mention, both as a writer, and just in terms of like, if I should mention this one, I would tell my readers Good heavens, when I went to Data and Society it was so I could work alongside danah boyd, who is an ethnographer, who was during the 2020 census embedded in the Census Bureau. And so she and I, were were thinking about these questions alongside one another. And I often say, and it’s a little bit of a joke, but it’s actually entirely true that like, danah would drag me into the present. So Dana, would consistently and constantly force me to ask the question like, why does this matter? Right now, I kind of got hooked on the idea that I could actually be useful I was I was on record. And plenty places saying historians are not useful. That is our job, our job is not to be useful. And then, in the course of the 2020 census, I through data, it can be connected with folks who are advocating for the 2020 census who are concerned about particular political interventions that were making it more difficult to get everyone counted, and everyone being counted as something that I think is the moral and political responsibility. And so I learned the historians can be very useful not because we come up with grand arguments. So like, the things that other historians value and I value to are not the primary way that we’re useful or useful, because we know a lot of stuff about record systems, and we know where things are. And so I’d have lawyers or people with civil rights groups who would say, why is this like this? I’d say, I don’t know. But I’ll find out. And I would go and look and try to figure this out. And I would learn a great deal about the census and the process of doing this, I could produce a little white paper or something, or, you know, PowerPoint presentation for these folks within then they could use in their advocacy and could see where we all benefited from this. And so I didn’t so much wasn’t as much reading as my working alongside danah, but working with these with lawyers, advocates, activists, I learned a lot of different ways of seeing the census that otherwise I would have never had any way of appreciating. I guess the other universe, I would say, is our novelists I love I love reading. novelists want to have a chance. And there are a number of really great novelists of bureaucracies that I remember I was in the New York Public Library and I stopped peeking out one time, the title of it was the Beautiful Bureau. And then it had like the New York Public Library’s over it. I’m like, That’s gotta say bureaucrat. And sure enough, I pulled it out. And it was the Beautiful Bureaucrat, and I thought, oh, and it is just this enormously, like inventive, very slim, and gorgeous novel that I got down. Helen Phillips wrote The Beautiful Bureaucrat. After that she wrote this, what is one of the best novels I read in 2019 and 2020, called The Need in which she takes ordinary parenting, and turns it into this really thrilling and startling and kind of scary thriller. So I mean, I think one of the reasons I like reading Helen Phillips is because, like me, she’s trying to take ordinary things and show the drama inside of them. Or there’s this book called Census by Jesse Ball, which was suggested to my friend, the documentary maker, Penny Lane. And and what Paul does is, he writes and imagine the different kinds of census censuses much people go and kind of ask open ended questions about to people and it’s like really wonderful, inventive way of thinking otherwise about what a census might be. And Penny’s work to is, is for me, really inspiring. She most recently produced a documentary for HBO on Kenny G. And one of the things that he does over and over again, and she comes to sources and she’s just so intent on understanding them in their own from their own view from their own viewpoint in a way that then takes this case like someone who a lot of people love a lot of people look down upon us like terribly middlebrow and and helps us to see why he thinks why he does what he does and why other people enjoy what he does. And it’s gonna explores from all these different angles and it just has this like this great generosity of spirit, which I think is the thing that I look for and that draws me in to like anybody I read. That generosity of spirit is I think one of the most important thing if I’m looking for in the things I read.
Kate Carpenter 50:00
Before I let you go, can I ask you if you’re working on anything new now.
Dan Bouk 50:03
So like I say, I learned from this project that a historian could occasionally be useful. And I find that interesting, because it gives me a reason, another reason beyond blogging to write and to study things. And so I’m in the very, very, very, very, very, very early stages of this project. But I lived here in New York through the 2020, defund New York Police Department protests. My my kid and I were walked down to us to city hall in the midst of those, and I saw this happen. And then I saw the city council pass a budget that did not defund New York Police Department, and are living right now through other kind of budget debates here in New York City. And the budget is a very boring topic. And so it’s right up my alley. And so I want to write a book that is about the history of budget activism. And I’m kind of imagining it as something like a history of defunding, like how and why people define things, or are you for the defunding of things? Maybe, maybe the thread will be one particular kind of argument, something like the argument over different NYPD may be something entirely different. But that will be the the excuse we have then to dig into these questions about how it is that cities and states make budgets, how people treat budgets as political and moral documents. I don’t really know I’m learning. I’m about to start teaching in a week, a new course called the history of money, which I will use also to try to help me figure out what it is I’m going to be writing. But so I’ll let you know in 10 years.
Kate Carpenter 51:48
I can’t wait. I will be waiting with bated breath in the meantime. Well, Dr. Bouk, thank you so much for joining me. This is great. I really enjoyed hearing more about your writing process.
Dan Bouk 51:57
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter 51:58
Thanks again to Dr. Dan Bouk, for joining me on Drafting the Past. His new book, Democracy’s Data, is out now and you can purchase it through the link in our show notes at drafting the past.com. One more note before we go. This week, I launched a Patreon account for Drafting the Past. In case you are unfamiliar with Patreon, it’s a platform that allows audience members like you to contribute a couple of dollars a month to support art and content that you love. If you’re a fan of drafting the past and you’d like to help fund the show’s continued production, check out patreon.com/draftingthepast or find the link in the show notes. Until next time, happy writing!
