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Accountable Data: The Politics And Pragmatics Of Disclosure Datasets, Lindsay Poirier

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

This paper attends specifically to what I call "disclosure datasets"- tabular datasets produced in accordance with laws requiring various kinds of disclosure. For the purposes of this paper, the most significant defining feature of disclosure datasets is that they aggregate information produced and reported by the same institutions they are meant to hold accountable. Through a series of case studies of disclosure datasets in the United States, I specifically draw attention to two concerns with disclosure datasets: First, for disclosure datasets, there is often political and social mobilization around the definitions that determine reporting thresholds, which in turn implicates what …