Data science is the foundation of our modern world. It underlies applications used by billions of people every day, providing new tools, forms of entertainment, economic growth, and potential solutions to difficult, complex problems. These opportunities come with significant societal consequences, raising fundamental questions about issues such as data quality, fairness, privacy, and causation. In this book, four leading experts convey the excitement and promise of data science and examine the major challenges in gaining its benefits and mitigating its harms. They offer frameworks for critically evaluating the ingredients and the ethical considerations needed to apply data science productively, illustrated by extensive application examples. The authors' far-ranging exploration of these complex issues will stimulate data science practitioners and students, as well as humanists, social scientists, scientists, and policy makers, to study and debate how data science can be used more effectively and more ethically to better our world.

From facial recognition—capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search. Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations, and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations, and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom? Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc, and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data—where it has been and where it might yet go—Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.