The Modern Census: Evolution, Examples and Evaluation

A national census provides important information on a country's population that is used in government planning and to underpin the national statistical system. Therefore, the quality of such information is paramount but is not as simple as the crude accuracy of population totals. Furthermore, changes in the pace and nature of modern life, such as the growing geographical mobility of the population, increasingly pose challenges to census practice and data quality. More recently, even the need for a census has been questioned on grounds of financial austerity and widespread availability of alternative population information sources. This article reviews how the modern census originated and how it evolved to confront these challenges, driven by indicators of quality and needs of users, and provides reflections on the future of the census within the national statistical infrastructure. To illustrate our discussions, we use case studies from a diverse range of national contexts. We demonstrate the implications that a country's needs, circumstances and experiences have on the census approach and practice while identifying the fundamental demographic assumptions

Newsworthy Migrants: Sentiment and Text Analysis of Dutch Newspapers

Understanding how a migrant population is viewed and displayed by the host country has been a struggle for a long period of time for anyone studying migration. Traditional methods of collecting information were tedious, time intensive and expensive. However, Big data has been providing unique solutions to gaps in information in many different fields across the world. Media plays an important part in developing and assessing the public opinion on a topic. With the availability of a large number of online articles from historical time periods, it is possible to use quantitative analysis, such as text analytics, to can see how the ‘migrant’ is presented in local Dutch newspapers using online records of articles. Average sentiment of the analyzed articles were in general negative but also varied over time, with negative sentiment peaking in 2015 which is correlated with high unemployment in the country. Words most commonly associated with articles with keyword ‘migrant’ included ‘work’, ‘policy’ and ‘jobs’ suggesting that migrants are often portrayed in an economic or political context

Special Libraries, September 1973

Volume 64, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1973/1006/thumbnail.jp

The Cost of Property Rights: Establishing Institutions on the Philippine Frontier Under American Rule, 1898-1918

We examine three reforms to property rights introduced by the United States in the Philippines in the early 20th century: the redistribution of large estates to their tenants, the creation of a system of secure land titles, and a homestead program to encourage cultivation of public lands. During the first phase of American occupation (1898-1918), we find that the implementation of these reforms was very slow. As a consequence, tenure insecurity increased over this period, and the distribution of farm sizes remained extremely unequal. We identify two primary causes for the slow progress of reform. The first was the high cost of implementing these programs, together with political constraints which prevented the government from subsidizing land reforms to a greater degree. The second was the reluctance of the government to evict delinquent or informal cultivators, especially on public lands, which reduced the costs of tenure insecurity.

Data Practices: Making Up a European People

What is “Europe” and who are “Europeans”? Data Practices approaches this contemporary political and theoretical question by treating it as a practical problem of counting. Only through the myriad data practices that make up methods such as censuses can EU member states know their national populations, and this in turn is utilized by the EU to understand the population of Europe. But this volume approaches data practices not simply as reflecting populations but as performative in two senses: they simultaneously enact—that is, “make up"—a European population and, by so doing—intentionally or otherwise—also contribute to making up a European people. The book develops a conception of data practices to analyze and interpret findings from collaborative ethnographic multisite fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary team of social science researchers as part of a five-year project, Peopling Europe: How Data Make a People. The book focuses on data practices that involve establishing and assigning people to categories and how this matters in enacting Europe as a population and people. Five core chapters explore key categories of people—usual residents, refugees, homeless people, migrants, and ethnic minorities—and how they come into being through specific data practices such as defining, estimating, recalibrating and inferring. Two additional chapters address two key subject positions that data practices produce and require: the data subject and the statistician subject