The Statistical Lives of Elbertie Foudray
Dan Bouk
The talk tells the story of a long-forgotten scientist named Elbertie Fourday, who spent more than two decades with the U.S. Census Bureau, where she built and maintained an infrastructure that made possible new statistical methods for thinking about the American people. I show how Foudray worked in a world where statistics mattered: they defined classes, races, and sexes; they served to demonstrate the modernity of nation-states; and they under-girded the allocation of power and representation, while playing key roles in debates about immigration and who could or should count as part of the nation. Foudray also made possible new uses of statistics, helping to usher in a world that sought to predict and mold the futures of individuals as well as states.
Dan Bouk researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. Bouk studied computational and industrial mathematics as an undergraduate before pursuing a Ph.D. in the history of science. He is the author of How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual and Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, which was a New York Times Notable Book. His work includes essays and articles on the history of personal data in the U.S. and on the concept of the ‘baby boom’ generation, as well as the report House Arrest: How an Automated Algorithm Has Constrained Congress for a Century. He has been a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Data & Society Research Institute. He is Professor of History at Colgate University.