Statistical norms functioned as instruments of social normalization and control in the nineteenth century.

Evidence

Dry details perhaps? Every process of abstracting knowledge from every day life needs practical tools for formulating it in public as well as devices to disseminate it. This “concrete history of abstraction” is of enormous significance for understanding nineteenth-century Western politics and social reform. Numbers, and the statistical science that developed through them, enabled a model of social control, with the statistical norm operating as an instrument of normalization, within a wider vision of “government from the social point of view.” This was the period when the modern psychological disciplines and the practices of social care and urban policy developed. Statistical knowledge brought with it, over time, more complex mechanisms of description, what historian Dan Bouk calls “data aggregates” such as “charts, tables, maps, or even algorithms.” For example, Charles Booth’s London poverty maps (prints of which can still be seen on the corridors of the London university where one of us works) provided a tool for managing neighborhoods as part of the wider regulation of social life. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 375

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s disciplinary power and biopolitics frameworks; also resonates with the reader’s interest in data-driven social control as precursor to data colonialism. — connects to: Statistics’ claim to objectivity merged with racial hierarchies and eugenics in the nineteenth century. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 376; The normalizing society combines disciplinary and regulatory norms, not just expanded discipline — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 7234; Nineteenth-century statistics was publicly debated; today’s ML computing the social goes unobserved. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 380
• DEFINE: Introduces Dan Bouk’s term ‘data aggregates’ for charts, tables, maps, and algorithms as descriptive mechanisms.

Broader Connections

• The normalizing society combines disciplinary and regulatory norms, not just expanded discipline #expands (0.82) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 7234
• Nineteenth-century statistics was publicly debated; today’s ML computing the social goes unobserved. #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 380