A Survey of the Literature.

This essay examines the historical relationship between datafication—the transformation of social life into quantifiable data—and the novel as a cultural technology for personifying the masses, arguing that contemporary mass personalized politics and media emerge from a long-standing survey culture rooted in mid-twentieth-century social science. It explores how statistical methods used in studies like the Elmira Community Study of voting behavior and the Kinsey Reports on sexuality shaped both political and literary representation, contributing to the rise of mass personalization through data aggregation. The essay also discusses the ambivalent cultural role of statisticians as democratic exemplars amid popular suspicion, and how the novel's traditional social functions were disrupted by the ascendancy of quantitative social sciences, leading to the displacement of classical literary realism by mass cultural genres and minority literatures that engaged with datafication. Ultimately, it situates datafication as a persistent and evolving force in American democracy and literature, highlighting the insights of minoritized writers who have historically navigated and contested these regimes of quantification.