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The DATA SCIENCE Mystery Revealed!

by basicact

I’ve been following the DATA SCIENCE movement with increasing interest for several months now. I find it to be a fascinating development in human problem solving, and one that also has significant implications for data visualization. As scientists are not typically considered artisans or craftspeople, my curiosity was piqued when I learned recently that they were becoming self-aware.

I’ve come to suspect that DATA SCIENCE is a phenomenon that has many of the attributes associated with the early stages of other paradigm shifts in history. 

It appears that several interesting things are happening concurrently:

  • The emerging data science disciplines (data mining, machine learning, and statistical modeling) are maturing at an exponential pace.
  • Computers and the Internet are becoming ubiquitous in business, government and research organizations.
  • Visualization tools are becoming more powerful and easier to use.
  • These three trends converge in a rapidly growing need to analyze data for specific purposes: e-commerce, marketing, customer relationship management, search & discovery, workplace productivity, urban planning and other “smart” applications. You can consult with the RemoteDBA administrators.
  • Just as data about people and their behaviors (historical and current) is increasingly available, so too are the tools to make sense of it all. And now that we can analyze such large, diverse and disparate collections of information together, we’re seeing the emergence of a new trans-disciplinary field that I’m calling “DATA SCIENCE”.
  • Data scientists are helping make sense of the data deluge by applying their analytic and modeling skills to specific problems in relatively narrow fields (e.g., recommending movies, targeting web ads, detecting spam email). As they help guide us through this new world that’s quickly becoming an integral aspect of our lives, I suspect that it won’t be long before we see some really exciting things happen as a result. And given all of the visualization tools now available (or soon to be), I’m feeling pretty good about betting on the arts & crafts angle too… 🙂
  • It has been said that “artists are just failed scientists.” It certainly seems true at first glance having looked at many works over the years where science was very much invoked and the results carefully and painstakingly rendered. Unfortunately, that is often indicative of work that is incomplete or perhaps just out-of-touch with contemporary issues.
  • Read Also: What is SEM?
  • I’m not suggesting here that there aren’t many great works of art using elements of science to convey a message (or simply as subject matter), but such pieces are more likely than not grounded in an understanding of how scientists actually work and what they do to make sense of their world. The connection between rigorous scientific inquiry and its visualization is something I’ve been thinking about for over a decade, and it seems like we’re finally making some progress towards bridging this gap…
  • My own story goes back several years when one day while looking at the cover art on my computer I noticed “Map of the Human Heart” and being a scientist I immediately recognized several symbols from my profession used as metaphors for something else. It was right there in front of my eyes, but it took a few more years before I was able to put the visual pieces together with what is now being called “data science.”
  • The fine art covers from Mathematics Illuminated were my first real clue that an artistic movement had been gaining momentum during times when most other kinds of art forms were struggling. The digital age has given us tools to make good on Barnett Newman’s observation: “We live at a time when men are taught by science that they can understand everything; this absolutism engenders skepticism. Perhaps man no longer loves knowledge because he finds himself incapable of loving what he knows.”
  • In the simplest sense, this has been a matter of timing and access to tools becoming cheap enough to make it possible for almost anyone to produce highly-realistic 3D images. With the growth of broadband, we’ve seen a proliferation of online resources where people can learn how to create art using these tools…

Conclusion:

In many ways, the widespread availability of these tools has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s good to have powerful new methods quickly disseminated in a way that makes them accessible to a broader community of practitioners and end users. On the other hand, we’re seeing a lot of work produced by people with an incomplete understanding of how data science actually works in practice.

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