Visualizing New York City by the Numbers: An Interview with Kubi Ackerman
Interviewed by Hannah Diamond
Today on Gotham, Hannah Diamond interviews Kubi Ackerman, guest curator of Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers, a special exhibition now on view and available online at the Museum of the City of New York. Who We Are examines the role data plays in shaping and reflecting the city around us. The exhibition examines New York City’s own history with the census and features works by contemporary artists and designers that illuminate our urban environment and our own identities.
What are the origins of Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers?
The origins of this exhibition go back to 2016, when MCNY was in the final stages of developing the Future City Lab, which is part of the ongoing New York at Its Core exhibition. During the development of the Lab, we convened an academic advisory committee that included Dr. Joseph Salvo, the Chief Demographer of the City of New York at the Department of City Planning. Already at that point Joe encouraged the Museum to consider doing something to address the upcoming decennial census. It’s fair to say that in many ways he was the guiding spirit behind the exhibition (which features a recorded interview with him, available on the Museum's YouTube channel).
We thought it was a great idea, not only because the Future City Lab was so heavily dependent on census data, but also because of the critical importance of the decennial census to the future of the city. At first, we worked on a somewhat more conventional proposal for an exhibition focused on the history of the census in New York City and the implications of the 2020 Census. But how could we communicate to the public that there is so much more to it than that? And more important, what unique strengths does the Museum have that can be brought to bear on this much larger effort to educate and inspire the public around the importance of participation in the census?
We had always had the intention of including work from contemporary artists or designers who work with census data, but at one point Sarah Henry, the Museum’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and co-curator of this exhibition had the thought that the entire exhibition could be centered around these more interpretive pieces. And that’s when it really came together for me as well, because I’ve had a longstanding passion for mapping and data visualization which I’ve pursued in my own work.
Who We Are has two parts: the story of the census and the development of data visualization as it relates to New York City and then an array of visualizations, art works, and literary interpretations of demographic data. How did you decide on this structure?
While the focus of the exhibition is on contemporary works, we also wanted to ensure that we covered the context within which these pieces were being created, and how they relate to the larger narrative of the importance of the census and the uses and collection of demographic data. We came across many intriguing stories which reinforced the central role of the census in shaping the course of our nation’s social and economic development. One example is how the massive tabulation efforts of the census in the late 19th century — which constituted the nation’s most complex data processing effort at the time — led to the invention of the Hollerith Machine, which was a precursor to modern computers, establishing a direct evolutionary connection between the census and the modern information age.
How do you see the two halves of the exhibition relating to each other? What connections or juxtapositions between these two parts do you want viewers to notice?
One of the things that the exhibition makes clear is that, despite the increasingly sophisticated tools we have to gather, process, interpret, and visualize this data, the basic concerns and preoccupations we have are ones which have inspired and bedeviled Americans from the outset. The history of the nation is encapsulated in the census, both in the process of counting and tabulating and in the results of the data. Our fraught relationship with race is perhaps the most obvious example of this; a chart that we have reproduced in the anteroom traces how the census has both reflected and codified changing attitudes toward race and ethnicity over time, and these linkages also exist across many of the artifacts and contemporary works. For example, one can make connections between the reproductions of late 18th century ledgers which listed all respondents as either free whites, other free persons, or slaves, and Neil Freeman’s videos, in which the city’s census block groups are broken apart and laid into a new grid according to various metrics such as median household income, percent people of color, etc. The legacy of past injustices remains starkly inscribed on the urban landscape, visible through data.
As someone who thinks about our urban environment and what it means to develop cities sustainably, what role does data play in your own work?
There is an increasing volume of data being collected on the urban environment and urban populations, which provide us with all kinds of information that would have been inaccessible or unavailable in the past. And overall I think this is of great benefit, because having such data allows us to better understand society and to make informed decisions for the future. It also can be used to challenge assumptions, and that is perhaps its greatest power — we all tend to have a view of our world that is necessarily based on our own narrow set of experiences and prejudices, and data can be used to expand and challenge that view.
But at the same time we must be cautious about how we use such data and what lessons we draw from it. There has been a lot of attention given to the concept of “smart cities,” for example, which is the concept of creating fully networked neighborhoods or cities where all decision making is highly data-driven. The application of this concept has been met with considerable resistance — one of the world’s most ambitious smart city plans, for Quayside in Toronto, was recently shelved in the face of sustained public opposition. There are a couple of things to be concerned about here: one is, who makes the decisions as to what data is gathered and how it is acted on? The second question is who gets to access and benefit from the data? With Quayside, the fact that an Alphabet subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, was in charge of the project made it unpalatable to many people who believe that data obtained from the public sphere should remain there and not be controlled by private interests.
I think that ultimately, to fall back on a cliché, information is power, and with power comes responsibility. We must also not forget that data, while often perceived as an objective window on the world, always comes with its own biases and elisions, and does not speak for itself. It requires interpretation. What this exhibition aims to show is how such interpretation is a highly creative act that can change our perception of the world.
“I Count Because” sign used at a New York City Council press conference, April 23, 2019.
Photograph by John McCarten.
Courtesy John McCarten / New York City Council
How would you characterize the role that the census and data collection have played in New York City’s history?
While the census is a federal program with a national scope, New York City encapsulates many of the most interesting stories and conflicts around the process. While the intent of the census seems straightforward enough — a simple enumeration of the entire population — in practice, undertaking such a count is anything but simple, and not everyone gets counted. And the fact that the results are used to establish proportional political representation and distribution of federal funds distorts the process, as there are real political consequences to the outcome of this process. For that reason, the question of who gets counted has always been contentious, and the fact that certain segments of the population — immigrants, people of color, low-income people — are disproportionately undercounted is not due to random variation. The artifacts from the 1890 Police Census and headline coverage from the 1980 and 1990 censuses featured in the anteroom (on loan from the New York City Municipal Archives) document the fact that the city has contested the results of the official count on multiple occasions, in some cases conducting its own alternate enumerations and suing to get the results changed in others. This demonstrates that the unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 questionnaire is part of a longstanding conflict between two different visions of America — one that is more narrowly defined, and the other more inclusive. This has often played out along urban/rural lines, which places New York — the nation’s largest city, and an immigrant city — at the nexus of the conflict.
Is there a particular artifact or visualization — either a contemporary or historical piece — in the exhibition that you’d like to highlight?
One of the pieces to first capture my imagination for this exhibition is Simulated Dendrochronology of Immigration to New York City, 1840-2017, created by Pedro Cruz, John Wibhey, and Felipe Shibuya at Northwestern University. This unwieldy title belies the simple beauty not only of the work but of the concept, which is to visualize the growth of the city through immigration as the growth of tree rings. In this piece, you watch the city grow as a series of nested rings; each ring represents one decade of immigrant arrivals to New York City from 1840 to 2017, with each cell representing 40 people. The authors color-coded the cells according to geographic origin and positioned them in the direction of the immigrants’ origins. Rings that are more skewed toward the east, for example, show more immigration from Europe, while rings skewed south show more arrivals from Latin America. New York City has been molded by decades of immigrant arrivals, their movements determined by global political and economic conditions — for example, the impact of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act is clearly visible in the animation, inscribed as a sudden southward and westward growth in the rings (as people from Latin America and Asia were able to more easily immigrate to New York).
Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration, 1840-2017
Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Felipe Shibuya, 2019. Courtesy Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, and Felipe Shibuya
(Simulated Dendrochronology can also be viewed as an animation on the Museum’s Youtube Channel.)
Has your appreciation for the census changed or shifted at all as you put this show together?
I have been working with census data for a long time, and it was critical to the development of the Future City Lab. So I was already fairly familiar with both the process and the data, and was a bit intimidated by the challenge of creating an exhibition on this seemingly arcane topic. But I was surprised by the amount of public attention that was given to the census as a result of the citizenship question controversy, which was occurring as we were planning the exhibition, and heartened by the sustained pushback and mobilization around maximizing participation in the city. While I had no doubt that we were working on something that is relevant for a wide public audience, this reassured me that it would be perceived as such, and that it wouldn’t be a huge lift to get people interested in coming to see the exhibition.
What insights about data and its role in New Yorkers’ lives do you hope viewers take away with them?
I hope that viewers will come away with a new perspective on the census and other demographic data. Data and numbers are often perceived as dry, reductive, lifeless abstractions of reality. And it’s true that purely quantitative information can never come close to capturing the full range of experience we have with each other and our surroundings. What I hope the exhibition demonstrates, however, is that the data can be used as a medium for creating rich, collective portraits of our city and our society that are full of life and fully human. The data can be interrogated and interpreted in provocative ways, and if we give it a chance it will retain the capacity to surprise us.
I also hope that people can see themselves in the data. As much as the census may also reduce our own complex identities to a series of check-boxes, there can be a sense of both reassurance and wonder at seeing the many ways in which we are like — and unlike — our fellow New Yorkers. And finally, I hope that people will take away a new understanding of and appreciation for New York City. We all have our own limited impressions of the city and its inhabitants, and it is fascinating, for me at least, to see how those impressions are reinforced or challenged by the works on display.
Landscapes of Inequality, New York City No. 2
Herwig Scherabon, 2019.
Courtesy Herwig Sherabon
It’s been fascinating in the last few months to see the big push the city has made this year to ensure a representative count in the 2020 census and to think about how that effort will be impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Are there stories or pieces highlighted in Who We Are that you feel speak to this current moment in the city?
One of the many difficulties of this pandemic is how it has upended so much of the effort that has gone into ensuring an accurate census count this year. Much of the direct community organizing around this issue is no longer possible. Many public resources such as libraries, which were to play a crucial role in outreach and provide computer access to fill out the form online for those who may not be able to at home, are closed. What the ultimate impact on the census will be is not yet clear, but as usual, the impacts will be distributed unevenly, to New York’s disadvantage. As of May 18, 2020, the city’s self response-rate was 49%, a full ten percentage points lower than the national average.[1] And while we should be wary of making facile comparisons, there is some correlation between areas that are difficult to count,[2] areas with low self-response rates, and areas where the disease has been most prevalent,[3] as factors such as access to health care are correlated with such things as income, citizenship status, and proficiency in English. And while people can certainly be forgiven for thinking that we have more pressing priorities than the census right now, the fact is that this moment is a time to reflect on how important the census is to understanding and fighting the pandemic. How do we know about infection rates, rates of transmission, and how it is affecting different racial, ethnic, and age groups? How can we make decisions about where to allocate resources for healthcare? These questions depend on having accurate baseline population estimates, which come from the census.
I think that while this moment is in many ways unprecedented, viewing our predicament with a bit of the historical perspective offered by the exhibition may reassure us. New York has been through many crises before, and has often re-emerged stronger from them. Understanding this does not diminish the reality of the suffering that is occurring in the city now, especially in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. But looking at how demographic change has occurred in the past, as reflected in the census data, crises have often engendered new opportunities. For example, during the fiscal crisis of the 1970’s, the population of the city dropped dramatically, and the impact on the social fabric of the city was severe. However, the relative affordability allowed for new populations to move in, and the city was reinvigorated over the next decades largely due to its role as a magnet for immigrants. Will the current crises provide opportunities for artists, immigrants, and others who have been shut out or displaced as the city has become more expensive? How can we use this moment to reimagine what the city can be and what it stands for? It is far too early to tell what the long-term impacts of this pandemic will be on New York City, but if we look to the stories from the past I see justification for hope.
Who We Are is now on view and available online through August 23, 2020. Census 2020 is now underway; you can complete your census online at 2020census.gov by October 31, 2020.
Hannah Diamond is a public historian and educator whose research focuses on the politics of race, gender, activism, and domesticity in the 19th century. She is currently an Education Coordinator at the Museum of the City of New York.
Kubi Ackerman is an independent consultant, designer, and curator, and was Guest Curator for the exhibition Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers. With expertise in exhibition development and extensive experience working on urban challenges, he is currently collaborating on projects with Thinc Design, the National Building Museum, and the Climate Museum. From 2015 to 2019, he was the Director of the Future City Lab at the Museum of the City of New York.
[1] The Census Bureau has a response rate tracking map which is updated daily, accessible here: https://2020census.gov/en/response-rates.html?#. Interestingly, it is showing low rates of self-response in some affluent parts of Manhattan that had high response rates in 2010. Ackerman speculates that this may be due to the fact that in some of these neighborhoods, a high percentage of the population has decamped for elsewhere, as evidenced by this map from The New York Times —https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/upshot/who-left-new-york-coronavirus.html — and may not be receiving reminders from the Census Bureau.
[2] The CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center has developed a “Hard to Count” map for the entire nation, which identifies areas where various factors contribute to the likelihood of low response rates: https://www.censushardtocountmaps2020.us/
[3] The New York City Department of Health publishes maps of total COVID-19 positive case counts by zip code, updated daily: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page