The origins of methodological genocide: “all science is becoming data science”

All science is becoming data science. Therefore data scientists have a lot of power in this regime [stifles a laugh] It’s a great time to be a data geek.

This is an interesting aside made by Bill Howe of Washington University in an early lecture on Coursera’s Introduction to Data Science MOOC. I take this to be the point that Emma Uprichard was making when she wrote about ‘methodological genocide’ last year in Discover Society:

At the risk of sounding a bit melodramatic, the big data hype is generating, for want of a better term, a methodological genocide. To my mind, it even has a flavour of being a disciplinary genocide. It is fierce and it is violent, and social scientists – and especially sociologists – need to fight back. Certainly, if we are going to meaningfully interrogate the social systems and structures that make up the social world, we will need to improve our quantitative skills. I know, I’m sorry to say it, I know this doesn’t always go down well among many social scientists, especially among those in the UK. But whilst I do think that one of the ways we will need to fight back is to increase our quantitative skills – we need to be clear about the kind of social science we move forward to [….]

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