As someone who’s really interested in social history, I feel like it’s the way in which we use quantitative data that determines whether or not our arguments are reductive. There are, of course, plenty of limitations to raw data, as pointed out in the article “Against Cleaning” when Rawson and Munez discuss the limitations of their own data in giving them information like their subjects’ internal thought processes. However, I’ve read a good amount of history books where quantitative data is used to really powerfully support the scholar’s argument. For example, I remember our discussion in class, when Dr. Andrella told us about the book written about slavery using economic data that basically came to the conclusion that enslaved people were, in a way, “willing” to participate in their forced roles in the economy.
Switching topics, I was really excited (in a nerdy way) to see authority controls brought up in “Against Cleaning”, as I spent a good chunk of my summer learning about them. This was both because I was enrolled in a course on cataloguing and was helping the Dale Center with a digital humanities project that involved cataloguing. I spent a lot of time scrolling through the Library of Congress’s Subject Headings for the correct term/phrase to tag different World War II posters with for the Dale Center, and for my cataloguing class, random books that we had been assigned to “catalogue.” I was glad to learn (and now think more critically) about the problematic aspect of LOC Subject Headings. None of the cataloguing I did really involved any culturally sensitive material, but I was really surprised in class discussion to learn some of the cataloguing language recently in use, and even still in use in some cases.
I was also particularly horrified to read in “The Power Chapter” that there had been no data kept on Black women dying in childbirth. I feel like it’s a really well-known issue, I can recall learning about it when I was in high school, and I know that it’s been an issue for MUCH longer than that, so the fact that the institutions that keep track of these things simply didn’t think it was important enough is really shocking. The fact that they don’t keep data more broadly about childbirth complications is even more shocking. I’ve heard before that there’s a huge problem in medicine of researchers not testing various drugs, analyzing symptoms, etc. in women and only testing them in men, resulting in women not receiving as effective treatment, as well as women of color being denied proper medical care due to racist assumptions. I feel like “The Power Chapter” does a good job of highlighting how that has real-world consequences for people. When activists say “representation matters”, of course they mean representation in the media and politics, but I feel like it also really applies to data representation.
One last note: I thought it was incredibly interesting (and powerful) that Ida B. Wells herself used statistical data to seek justice and truth surrounding lynchings as early as the 19th century. I feel like hers is the most powerful example of how data involving people is much more than just numbers on a chart, but revelations about real people’s experiences, and can often be evidence of atrocities committed against people. I’ve been to the Civil Rights museum in Jackson multiple times, and I remember the exhibit with the long, long list of names of people who had been lynched in Mississippi. It’s stayed with me for years, because there were so, so many names, and I knew that each one represented a person. This is the way in which data can be used to bring forth marginalized voices, and this is one of the reasons I really value social history as a way of “doing history”.