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

Data scientists dominated conversations in the big-data era. Industries, disciplines, and public agencies that had done well without coding and math sought new specialists, while many academics looked on with skepticism. Curiously, 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? My analysis 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. It shows how participants devised the technical machinery for seeing the world through datasets. Counterintuitively, they also analyzed the social surroundings of their technical work. Going beyond the theoretical divide between expert work as a formal or informal affair, this study reveals relational discipline and reflexive creativity as meso-level mechanisms of professional emergence.