Lecture 2

census, statistics, and "computational politics"

readings:

Desrosieres, Alain. "Prefects and Geometers" in The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, ch 1. (book available through Slack)

Sarah Igo, The Averaged American (Harvard, 2007), introduction.

Zeynep Tufekci, 2014. Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics, First Monday, Volume 19, Number 7 - 7 July 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097

discussion:

• vulcans, martians, and domain expertise
• election of 2016: marketing and polling
• A/B testing and causality