In this illuminating collection, Evelyn Ruppert, Stephan Scheel and their contributors show how state building within the European project is bound up with proliferating classification devices, measuring, sifting, and sorting populations into insider and outsider categories. This rigorous collection brings home how we are living through a crucial period in which data is mobilised in increasingly powerful and pervasive ways.
Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics
Data Practices brings together a range of sophisticated approaches to the ways in which digital data make up and act on social worlds. In doing so, it lends a vibrant contemporary concreteness to the ways in which new statistical aggregations have contributed to the production of the transnational structures and processes that characterize the European project. Its double-take on how these have shaped both a European population as an object of governance and a European peoplehood as a new if fragile set of identities is exemplary.
Tony Bennett, Emeritus Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Evelyn Ruppert and Stephan Scheel have brought together a brilliant collection of essays to help us understand how European people are made up through counting. The entities we call "Europe" and "European" can be studied in many ways, through history, institutions, language, and cultural practices... How people are counted and who is counted are crucial to both our understanding of populations and of politics.
Sally Wyatt, Professor of Digital Cultures, Maastricht University
Data Practices's detailed case studies of the practice of statistical data production should be included on the syllabus of any introductory statistics, data science or research methods course. However, it is its thoughtful consideration of quantitative data production from the perspective of the data subject, beyond the (often) superficial consideration of data privacy and security, that will earn it pride of place on my bookshelf.
Dr. Mariel McKone Leonard
London School of Economics Review of Books
