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Numeracy and Crowd Science

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This post was written by 2021 Junior Fellow Amal Charara.

It is likely that at some point in our lives we have found ourselves in a crowd of people.  Perhaps it was at a graduation ceremony, a concert, on a train platform or at an airport. We may have referred to it as small, large, or even dense.  For smaller events, like a birthday party, we may be able to estimate the number, because it takes place in a small space, but larger spaces with people standing next to each other presents a challenge – particularly when tasked with trying to determine an exact number. How do we estimate the sizes of such massive crowds?

Five children sitting around the table looking at a woman with a birthday cake and candles on the table hanging from the chandelier
A birthday party.May 1943.

Numeracy plays a big role in the lives of data journalists, geographers, and demographers who research and measure large crowds. There are several approaches or strategies used to determine these numbers or estimates. In the Oxford English Dictionary