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Is Data Science a Humanities Field?
Data Science belongs in the humanities, as much as it belongs in science and engineering.
More than fifty years ago, the English novelist and physical chemist C.P. Snow gave his classic lecture The Two Cultures at the University of Cambridge, describing the intellectual and cultural gulf that had already opened between the sciences and the humanities. Both the sciences and the humanities provide valuable tools to understand the world, and each toolkit is incomplete without the other. Snow lamented the scientific and technical ignorance of humanists and the humanistic ignorance of scientists, as major obstacles to human advancement.
Decades later, the gulf between the sciences and the humanities remained, perhaps becoming even wider. However, synthesis between the two cultures was so valuable, those at the crossroads found remarkable opportunities. In the 1970s, Steve Jobs created his company Apple in a way that deliberately blended outstanding engineering with extraordinary design. Jobs attributed Apple’s success to this marriage of the liberal arts with computing.
The modern discipline of data science is a trendy buzzword for an emerging field. But data science simply means the art and science of data analysis. And when done well, it stands firmly at the nexus between the two cultures, the sciences as well as the humanities, drawing extensively from both.
How Data Science Blends the Two Cultures
Often, data science is simply described as an engineering field. It is frequently folded into computer science and engineering departments at universities and into engineering teams at companies. While engineering is a major component of data science, calling data science engineering erases essential parts.
For example, a major tool of data science is machine learning, the use of algorithms to make predictions or decisions based on existing data. Of course, this includes engineering problems. Implementing the algorithms falls clearly within the discipline of engineering. So does the enabling…
