Census Technology, Politics, and Institutional Change, 1790–2020

The IT of Demography

“…Mechanical tabulation relied on a new technology of data capture and storage: a card onto which information could be punched, which would then be sorted and counted by the electromechanical tabulator. Over the first half of the 20th century, the Census Bureau, in competition with IBM and Remington Rand (another company with Census Bureau roots), improved the card punching, sorting, and tabulation process as much as possible [64].…”

“…The resulting machines, known as the Universal Automatic Computer or UNI-VAC, became available after the 1950 Census and aided in its tabulation. The UNIVAC stored data in a new way, on magnetic tape, but information still had to be punched onto cards in order to be transferred to the tape, and this process had become a reverse salient, holding back the efficiency of the entire system [64]. 2 Even before the UNIVAC was delivered, the Census Bureau had partnered with the U.S. National Bureau of Standards to develop a new data capture technology that could rapidly scan the images on specially designed pages that had been microfilmed and encode them on magnetic tape, bypassing punched cards altogether.…”

“…In 1850, after a data-collection debacle in the 1840 census that appeared to provide ammunition to supporters of slavery [17], the individual replaced the household as the unit of enumeration, swelling the quantity of data collected every ten years. The task of converting manuscript census returns into volumes of printed numbers inspired new methods of data storage and manipulation: first data sheets and tally marks, and then in 1890 punched cards and tabulating machines [64]. Since then, the histories of computing technology and demographic research and analysis have been closely intertwined.…”

“…In 1960, the Census Bureau began to use electronic computers to capture and analyze data. This story is now well known [2], [64]. What is less well known are the cycles of innovation that have taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries that link the transformation of computing technology with an increasing capacity to understand and analyze human populations.…”

Challenges of Large-Scale Data Processing in the 1990s: The IPUMS Experience

“…T he U.S. Census Bureau played a key role in the development of computing technology. The two leading computer companies of the middle decades of the 20th century-IBM and Remington Rand's UNIVAC division-had roots as data processing companies that built equipment for the Census Bureau, and the Bureau indirectly funded the development of the first commercial computer beginning in 1946 [26].…”