Phillips, Jonathan: Measuring State Self-Legibility in the Digital Age

(PDF) Beyond seeking to make society 'legible', states also try to read and manage their own decentralized assets. Taking government databases of schools and health clinics as themselves the object of inquiry, I propose to measure legibility by comparing multiple records on the same school across time and across sources. This enables a preliminary assessment of the factors driving increased legibility (dense populations, rugged terrain and high governance capacity) and of what happens when a school or clinic becomes legible (not much).