The Science of Statistics and the Politics of Census-Taking

My project considers the transition from manual to machine data processing across Europe. The electronic tabulating machine appealed much more readily to some societies than others. Where concerns about migration were significant, frontiers uncertain, and ethnic divisions tangible, machine readability found strong advocates in central governments, in Washington thanks to the efforts of one Hermann Hollerith, founder of IBM, but also in Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Vienna.

In Berlin, the Prussian statisical bureau remained firmly committed in the rationalities of state paternalism until the eve of the First World War, employing some two thousand war invalids strewn across the city, all toiling on a strictly piece rate basis. By 1914, the archiving and corrolating of census data in Vienna, by way of contrast, was an entirely different affair, requiring much greater advance planning, a much less skilled but centralized workforce, and, not least, significant outlays of capital to keep the tabulating machines running: machines that could interpret untold reams of punch cards. In the German Empire, the unprecedented challenges brought about by the First World War prompted an about-face toward big data machinery. I am currently exploring on what terms the world’s first total war accelerated the adoption in Central Europe of tabulating machines quinessentially identified – then as now –  with the United States, the country responsible for Germany’s loss in 1918.