rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: America by the numbers
    sub title: quantification, democracy, and the birth of national statistics
  name:
    name part: Didier, Emmanuel
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  name:
    name part: Porter, Theodore M.
    name part: 1953-
    role:
      role term: author of forward.
  name:
    name part: Sen, Priya Vari
    role:
      role term: translator.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  genre: biography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: mau
    date issued: 2020
    copyright date: 2020
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  language:
    language term: fre
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xi, 415 pages : illustrations, map ; 23 cm.
  abstract: This is a title in the Infrastructures series and it is a translation from the French (it was published in France by la Decouverte in 2009). It is a look at the infancy of agricultural and labor statistics in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. On the face of it, this seems like a dry topic, but it was written with an eye toward giving life and detail to the growth and development of statistics and quantification in the United States. Didier shows that the data collected was used in very real wasy to help everyday Americans improve their livelihoods and forges a more cohesive American economy and identity. The author charts the National Agricultural Statistical Services (and successive government organizations such as the Bureau of Crop Estimates, the Division of Markets, etc.) early attempts at gathering and making sense of agricultural data. In his study, Didier links methods of surveying (and sampling the population) with different ideals of democracy and of public participation. Little has been said of the role agricultural surveys played in the shaping of statistics and survey data in the United States, more attention has been paid to the urban side of this story. Ted Porter, who wrote the foreword, wrote of this book in his initial review, "One more very appealing dimension of this book is its friendly, close-to-the-ground presentation of the work of statisticians. He develops this material not as a theoretical working-out of general survey strategies, but as a series of practical tactics developed to deal with specific problems arising in the course of the work. This makes the book much more readable and interesting to someone not specifically devoted to statistical methodologies, and is also, in my view, more faithful to how things really unfolded.
  table of contents: Introduction: America's Reflexivity -- Part 1: The Decomposition of America -- The America of the Reporters -- The Decomposition of Links Between Statistics and Politics -- Part 2: Expression of Random America: On the Rural Front -- From the Political Representative to Statistical Representativeness -- Probable Error -- The Administration and University -- Areal America -- Part 3: Expression of Random America: On the Urban Front -- The Paradoxical Decomposition of Unemployment -- How to Transform the Victims of the Depression into Enumerators? -- From Participationism to a Government of the Masses.
  note: Emmanuel Didier ; forward by Theodore M. Porter ; translated by Priya Vari Sen.
  note: "Translated from the original French, En Quoi Consiste L'Amerique?: Les Statistiques, le New Deal et la Démocratie, © Editions La Decouverte, Paris, France, 2009" --Title page verso.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    name:
      name part: United States.
      name part: Bureau of Agricultural Economics
    topic: Officials and employees
  subject:
    name:
      name part: United States.
      name part: Bureau of Labor Statistics
    topic: Officials and employees
  subject:
    name:
      name part: United States.
      name part: Bureau of the Census
    topic: Officials and employees
  subject:
    topic: New Deal, 1933-1939
  subject:
    geographic: United States
    topic: Economic conditions
    temporal: 1918-1945
  subject:
    topic: Depressions
    temporal: 1929
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Agricultural surveys
    geographic: United States
    topic: History
    temporal: 1919-1933
  subject:
    topic: Statisticians
    geographic: United States
    genre: Biography
  classification: E806 .D5725 2020
  classification: 973.917
  related item:
    title info:
      title: Infrastructures series
  identifier: 9780262538374
  identifier: 0262538377
  identifier: 2019022829
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 190805
    record change date: 20200709120020.0
    record identifier: in00004168971