Most historians have a complicated relationship with historical numbers and statistics. Perhaps more than any other discipline, historians understand data as a product of the specific political, cultural, and temporal setting in which they were produced. As such, historians are highly aware of data’s shortcomings, and often wary to use them. Have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater though? To which ends and in what form can historically produced numbers be useful? This roundtable invites scholars working in different historical contexts to reflect on how they are approaching, using, and constructing data. Marlous van Waijenburg will speak from her collaborative experience of creating a dataset that works to quantify and represent a period prior to the regular deployment of such constructs. Namely, she and her co-author Anne Ruderman turn instructional letters regarding practices of enslavement into variables and, in the process, reflect on how quantification helps us gain new insights into critical moments of changing global practices. Jessica Marie Johnson expands our conversation about enslavement to present work from the LifexCode digital humanities collaborative. Having built a digital humanities practice around critical annotation and tagging, Johnson’s contributions will serve to illuminate the numerous ways scholars of Black history are pushing against data’s deep ties to dehumanization. Casey Marina Lurtz’s work on manuscript surveys and tables from the Mexican countryside brings to the fore questions of aspirational standardization and centralization inherent in most state-guided data collection projects. By highlighting local rewriting of categories and reworking of the material of the survey itself, she demonstrates how anomalies usually corrected for can instead serve as guidance towards places and moments of insight. Finally, Sarah Nelson takes us to a period of consolidated data standardization via a multilateral organization dedicated to the spread of communications technology. By delving into a supranational effort to define and categorize information and the hurdles the International Telecommunication Union faced as it tried to do so, Nelson creates an opportunity to both make use of historical data and historicize its creation. During the first part of our panel, the panelists, along with our chair, Dan Bouk, will briefly discuss how they have faced these questions in their own work before engaging in a conversation about how historians can responsibly, effectively, and creatively make and make use of data. In the second half of the panel, we will open up discussion to the audience to invite further conversation. Topics will include what we can do with quantification, how we can make use of ever more sophisticated digital tools for creating and interpreting tables, and how to move forward without giving up either the critiques of the cultural turn or the richness of historical surveys and statistical publications. Through our multitude of approaches, we hope to invite historians sometimes wary of quantification to find ways to engage data-related methodologies critically and creatively.