Sociocultural anthropology's encounters with large public data sets.

This article asks how socioculturally inspired questions can be illuminated by exploiting large demographic data sets. Focusing on people represented in the annually updated Spanish Municipal Register (the Padrón Municipal) who report themselves as citizens of countries outside Spain, it treats demographic numbers as texts that can speak to us as plainly as words about something as challenging as the dynamics of identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]