If you happen to be a government minister making decisions about what questions to include in a #Census, there are some excellent books on categories and category work that are important reading.

Our world is built on categories. Categories have power. And those people for whom there are no categories are dis-empowered, marginalised - and uncounted.

Data Feminism, by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, takes an intersectional feminist view of data analytics, showing how data do not speak for themselves, and how the work of data analysts - category work - is crucial to social change.

https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/

Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star is an exploration of how categories form part of infrastructure, blending into the background, invisibly shaping the world. Bowker and Star show how categories legitimate various things - types of work, types of people.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4738/Sorting-Things-OutClassification-and-Its

Categories we Live By: How we classify everyone and everything by Gregory Murphy shows us where categories come from, how they are shaped, and the power they have.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547031/categories-we-live-by/

The government is responsible for "category work" in the census - defining the categories that shape Australia, and the categories that make people invisible - or serve to hide them.

The #Census is category work. And we need better categories.

#AusPol #Equality #CensusFail

🌈 hi again friends 👋 time to like, boost, & share on all your socials to support proper recognition of #queer folk as part of the Australian population 🏳️‍🌈

(yes, I agree that giving such info to the #government can be problematic - but we should have a way to be counted if we choose to share)

Our national #Census should count every one of us, properly. But we still don’t know how many #LGBTIQ+ people there are in #Australia. Join the campaign, calling on the #ABS and Albanese Government to #CountUsIn2026?

https://equalityaustralia.org.au/countusin2026/

#AusPol
#CensusFail (redux)
#LGBT
#LGBTQIA+

This week is now seven years since the 2016 #censusfail. It’s been fantastic to see the Australian government learn every lesson about IT outsourcing and everything works just fine.

“Lessons from the Censusfail omnishambles” (15 Sep 2017) https://authory.com/Stilgherrian/Lessons-from-the-Censusfail-omnishambles-a84998ff3b7ee41d698a9c1308369a8e1

fuck the #census for not being trans friendly and only allowing people to declare their biological sex tbh

also the fucking online shit logged me out halfway through for no reason and made me start over so fuck that too

#censusfail #census2020

RT @[email protected]: "Australia is a prototype of how internet policy can go terribly, horribly wrong" @[email protected] on #siteblock #searchblock #copyright laws https://boingboing.net/2018/11/02/a-spider-for-the-fly.html See also #auspol #auslaw on #dataretention #censusfail #robodebt #myhealthrecord #waronmaths

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/DrRimmer/status/1058629698941407234

« Disgusting that ABS continues to peddle nonsense that legitimate #CensusFail #privacy concerns were a media beat-up. https://www.themandarin.com.au/85667-abs-boss-on-data-integration-why-arent-we-talking-about-this-in-the-community/ »

— Retweet https://twitter.com/LiamPomfret/status/927382984134606849