Lunchtime seminar: Big data and the end of theory, on 21 June

Eliyahu Sapir, Tamar Sharon and Sally Wyatt organised the next session of the Data Science Research Seminar Series (organised jointly with the Institute of Data Science) at FASoS. All are welcome.

When: Thursday 21 June, 12.00-13.00
Where: Attic, Grote Gracht 80 – 82

Please register before 18 June

This is a literature seminar with a difference – instead of discussing something new, we want to re-visit an article that is now 10 years old, but still has impact.

In 2008, in a much-cited, provocative and thought‐provoking article titled “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete”, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, suggested that academic researchers needed to learn from Google. As the title of his article indicates, Anderson boldly announced that the advent of the availability of huge amounts of data, coupled with advanced statistical and computational tools to crunch these numbers, rendered theory and the scientific method obsolete. We no longer need to follow the traditional approach of ‘hypothesis, data collection, testing’ and discuss whether results refute or support our hypotheses. Instead, in this age of petabytes, “correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all”. This position has been both praised – for heralding a new way of doing science; and severely criticized – for missing the value of theory-driven enquiry and promoting big data hubris. Many others hold a middle way, according to which although in principle this may be true, we are still far from a place where “letting the data speak for themselves” can supplant the scientific method or theoretically informed research.

In this session, we invite you to read Anderson’s original article (available here, and very short). Before the meeting, please think about your own approach to data and theory. Is Anderson right to point to a new scientific paradigm? Or should we be more careful and consider the possible risks of pursuing such an approach? We are interested in exploring what these questions mean in different disciplinary contexts and what implications they have for the quality of our research output.

One of the outcomes of the meeting will be to produce a short bibliography of literature that addresses this question from different disciplinary perspectives. This could be a useful resource for all of us in future teaching and research activities. Please follow this link and share your suggestions with us. Once data collection is completed, we will distribute the final bibliography to all contributors.

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