censusAmericans by Jia Zhang

I work in tires. my daily commute is 125mins longI got married in 1975. I have a high school diploma. I get to work around 7:35am.

— censusAmericans (@censusAmericans) January 17, 2016

censusAmericans is a twitter bot that uses US census data to tell the stories of everyday Americans. Every hour, it uses the amassed data on one individual to post a tweet anonymously describing their life.

I work for the local government. I moved last year. I started but didn't finish college. I had less than 2 weeks off last year.

— censusAmericans (@censusAmericans) January 15, 2016

I really enjoy this type of storytelling: It’s intensely personal in a war that really plays to the apparent banality of the information given, and the individual tweets have a melancholy to them, since the tweets tend to focus on the difficulties these people have encountered in life.

These individual tweets are well executed enough that I feel a desire to learn more about these people. Jia Zhang, the creator, deliberately leaves a lot of information to the reader’s imagination, but it would be interesting if viewers could tweet at censusAmericans, and ask it to tell them more about somebody.