'Data Imaginary' is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary-what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do-in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data- driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature. Revisiting formative decades of