Inside Data Science: Hackers and the Making of a New Profession

Data scientists dominated conversations in the big-data era, as industries, disciplines, and public agencies that had previously done without coding and math sought new specialists. But the new hires had no clear tasks and felt uneasy under the spotlight.

How did some scattered nerds and hackers turn mostly familiar and partly questionable ideas into a new profession?

In his 2024 book, Inside Data Science: Hackers and the Making of a New Profession, sociologist Phillip Brandt draws on the history of quantitative thought, a reflexive data science-of-data science exercise, and three years of observations of semi-public gatherings in New York City’s tech scene in the early 2010s to show how participants devised the technical machinery for seeing the world through datasets.

Brandt’s talk will show how the interplay of personal reflection, technical rigor, and collective scrutiny gave the big-data era, for better or for worse, a human face.

Speaker: Phillip Brands, Sciences Po, Paris

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