Book Review

Doing Data Science

“Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”—that was the title of a 2012 article in Harvard Business Review. Many of us, I suspect, have never met a data scientist, and perhaps never heard of one. Although there’s mild controversy about the provenance of the term, it seems the first business cards bearing that job title were printed in 2008. By 2011, Michael Rappa of North Carolina State University counted 394 individuals identifying themselves as data scientists. He came up with this number by doing a little data science of his own: He searched the LinkedIn social network, counting professional profiles with “data scientist” as part of a present or previous job title. In May of 2014 I repeated that experiment and found
the population of data scientists on LinkedIn had grown to 4,696.