ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Racial Typologies and Twentieth-Century Statistics

• In Event: “Facing” the Past: Race, Craniometry, and the Afterlives of Human Skulls

English Abstract

This talk tells a history about statistics that begins with skulls. I show how several of the statistical tools and datasets we use today emerged within early twentieth-century race science. As the data was reused and repurposed throughout the twentieth century, it carried values forged in colonialism and racial classification. Through travel, the data's origins did not vanish but became embedded in the infrastructures of human identification technologies. Historical methods, I argue, are essential for understanding how “big data codifies the past” (Cathy O'Neil 2016) and how contemporary systems can amplify the biases embedded in their training data.

Author

• Iris Clever, University of Chicago