Democracy’s Data Cartels: Sarah Lamdan & Dan Bouk in Conversation
February 8th, 2023
12:15 – 1:15 p.m.
Case-Geyer, Batza Room (560)
Sarah Lamdan is a Professor of Law at the City University of New York’s School of Law. She also has a Master’s Degree in Library Science and Legal Information Management. Her research focuses on information law and policy, and her book Data Cartels: The Companies that Monopolize and Control our Information was published by Stanford University Press in 2022.
Dan Bouk is a professor in the history department at Colgate University and researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. He studied computational mathematics as an undergraduate, before earning a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. His first book, How Our Days Became Numbered (Chicago, 2015), explored the life insurance industry’s methods for quantifying people, discriminating by race, and thinking statistically. In Democracy’s Data, Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both condense and cleverly abstract: a universe of meaning and uncertainty, of cultural negotiation and political struggle.
This talk is co-sponsored with the Colgate University Data Science Collaboratory
