Dry details perhaps? Every process of abstracting knowledge from every day life needs practical tools for formulating it in public as well as devices to disseminate it. This “concrete history of abstraction” is of enormous significance for understanding nineteenth-century Western politics and social reform. Numbers, and the statistical science that developed through them, enabled a model of social control, with the statistical norm operating as an instrument of normalization, within a wider vision of “government from the social point of view.” This was the period when the modern psychological disciplines and the practices of social care and urban policy developed. Statistical knowledge brought with it, over time, more complex mechanisms of description, what historian Dan Bouk calls “data aggregates” such as “charts, tables, maps, or even algorithms.” For example, Charles Booth’s London poverty maps (prints of which can still be seen on the corridors of the London university where one of us works) provided a tool for managing neighborhoods as part of the wider regulation of social life.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 375