Census Data

On October 27, as a member of the 4-H Genealogy project I went to the de Young Museum to see the exhibit “Beautiful Data”. When we arrived, the exhibit was closed and we thought it would open later, so we went to have lunch and see some of the other exhibits in the museum. At 1:30 it was still closed, so we asked one of the staff when it would open and she said it was closed on Tuesdays. I think we looked depressed because she said she could take us in for a little bit. It turned out that the artist, Carlo Abruzzese was working despite the fact that is was closed. He was fine with us looking around for a bit and said we could ask him any questions that we had. So we kind of got our own private tour by the artist. How he made the art was by taking the ethnicity data from the 2010 census and grouping them into five different colours. It was also partially geographically correct. Even though the artist only used the geography, population, and ethnicity from the census, the census provides a lot more information than just that. A genealogist can learn a lot about one family, household, city, country, or, if the genealogist is doing this his whole life, the world. We were satisfied and lucky with what we learned at the de Young Museum.

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