Over the course of the 19th century, techniques for gaining knowledge about a given state’s population were successively perfected. Birthrates, legal customs, health metrics, family structures, property, and deviance were listed, processed, and recalculated. But where did these historical numbers come from originally, who collected this data, and who composed the questions it pursued? The planned conference investigates the practices of data production and knowledge gathering at the doorstep, as it were. Before technology could allow for ubiquitous data capture, the threshold of the home was a site of knowledge production: Envoys of the state or enumerators volunteering for an interest group arrived at people’s houses to make direct contact with the population of study. This mode of data collection is investigated in parallel to the rise in statistical numbers from 1800 to around 1950, with a particular emphasis on the data produced by private initiatives and collectives.
Our focus lies with the “scientification” of both the social (Lutz Raphael) and all forms of data about people. Firstly, we look at administrative practices and formats that choreograph what actors may protocol, process, or modify within the given information. Secondly, this scene of interrogation is guided by underlying categories and taxonomies within which these practices became possible. Both perspectives on data production impinge on the construction of subjects and privacy.

Administrative practices and formats: When at the beginning of the 19th century states began to institutionalize particular modes of data collection about their citizens, the procedures and legal implications were by no means clear. Therefore, a set of explicit or implicit rules had to be established to advise the “helping hands” and knowledge-collectors (such as local officials, physicians, religious clerics, teachers, statisticians, policemen, social workers, housewives etc.) as to what kind of information they should gather. For instance, police interrogation practices were reformed in the second half of the 19th century, methods of social work were devised according to the “social casework” of Mary Richmond, questionnaires from the discipline of legal anthropology were deployed to the colonies, and political enquêtes commissioned. The particular sites of these forms of bureaucratic empiricism are of key concern. They shape how agents of knowledge processing and subjects of data production form a specific micro-constellation. Data generation may result from interviews or cross-examinations and may be informed by deception or possible counter-knowledge.

While on the one hand this information is produced and maintained by large organizations and particularly states – and while the very format is potentially marginalizing and subordinating – statistics has, on the other hand, served as a powerful tool for independent interest groups. Such numbers can potentially challenge or reform the state: They counter hegemonic perceptions and thereby open up the possibility for “numbers from below.” In post-revolutionary France, for instance, the Deaf Community created its own system for accounting for the so-called “deaf-mutes” amongst them, in an effort to organize a power structure for what was sometimes called the “nation” of the Deaf. Other examples of early statactivisme (Isabelle Bruno/Emmanuel Didier) constitute important elements of women’s movements and are described in travel accounts about enumerative initiatives (Fallati, 1840). This raises the question of the particular relation between “weak knowledge” (Moritz Epple) and data collection.

Emergent categories and systems: Data generation about subjects produces subjectivities. New frames for people serve an operative function in administrative lists, file cabinets, and eventually warehouses full of analogue data. Ian Hacking has shown that in many ways an interplay between attributions of subject categories (such as “women,”, “mad,” and “workers”) and the addressed subjects must be taken into account – in what he calls the “feedback effect.” This is especially true for forms of state knowledge and its counter-knowledges: In order to generate information about the group of “workers,” a specific professional ethos had to be known to the data collectors in order for the group of “workers” to be constructed at all. With the introduction of the tabulating machine, new dynamics of categorization and intersectionality emerged. The invisible labor of veterans and housewives, who were well versed in manual data processing, was jeopardized (Christine von Oertzen). But how did these storage systems play out at the site at which knowledge was first gathered? Did the filing process, the retrieval systems, or mechanized counting impinge upon privacy or rather enhance and produce it? How is the personal sphere framed in legal terms, and when were technical infrastructures capable of linking data back to the respective doorstep of their first acquisition?

The conference focuses on the politics and historical epistemology of administrative knowledge and its counter-knowledges. As in the neighboring fields of the empirical sciences, where natural phenomena became increasingly “datafied,” institutions, international organizations, and allies of the state produced a new type of knowledge, e.g. in juridical, medical, and criminological constellations. Frank Pasquale emphasizes how the present is characterized by algorithmic opacity on the side of elite trading, and a notable increase in transparency for ordinary citizens. This international workshop sets out towards an archeology of this transparency.

Deadline: September 25th, 2019. Please send a title and an abstract of 200-400 words to: anna.echterhoelter@univie.ac.at. Travel expenses for the invited papers will be reimbursed.
Confirmed and invited participants:
Lars Behrisch, History (University of Utrecht, NL)
Dan Bouk, History (Colgate University, USA)
Emmanuel Didier, Sociology and History of Science (CNRS / ENSAE, FR)
Martin Herrnstadt, History of Science (University of Frankfurt / M., GER)
Christine von Oertzen, History of Science (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, GER)
Anke te Heesen, History of Science (Humboldt-University Berlin, GER)
Annemarie Steidl, Economic and Social History (University of Vienna, AT)
Mihai Surdu, Science and Technology Studies (University College Freiburg, GER)

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