Punch Card Memories: Mechanization and the Archiving of Data in the United States and Western Europe

In 1890, on the occasion of their country’s ninth national census, U.S. government officials deployed a first-of-its-kind punch card system to collect, process, and analyze immense volumes of information. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the American census had emerged as an effective means to gather data about society. Many actors supported the expansion of the census, including the state, though the staunchest advocates were in fact the country’s growing educated elite. University-based scholars came to regard the census as a highly useful way to document the successes and shortcomings of their republican experiment. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, their ambition to gather as much information as possible about the social and economic development of their country had reached an outer limit. As the volume of date proved too large to process by hand, educational authorities and state actors turned to a young engineer, Hermann Hollerith, to develop technological responses to the country’s late-Victorian data jam.

My project considers the development of the American census as a public scientific experiment, describing the arguments put forward to expand the country’s decennial census far beyond its Constitutional mandate. By the turn of the nineteenth century, American data power, both intellectual and mechanical in its origins, was capturing many foreign imaginations. The mechanized analysis of American census data fashioned an Atlantic public of data experts, one whose ranks swelled as Hollerith’s machines spread across the European continent. Exploring the terms on which Hollerith’s machines and methods were adopted in Austria, Germany, and France, my presentation explains how the mechanization and archiving of mass data reflected and shaped social realities on both sides of the North Atlantic.