In this chapter, data science will be defined as,“an emerging area of work concerned with
the collection, preparation, visualization, management, and preservation of large collections
of information”. Data science is not a scientific discipline, per se, but instead an
interdisciplinary approach to understanding data and analyzing it in a way useful to some
target stakeholders. In business settings, the term data scientist typically suggests a person
whose role is to organize, explore, and understand organizational data so that those data …

The techniques developed and being promoted in the interdisciplinary approach called data
science have immense potential to benefit mainstream social scientific research in three key
areas, with relatively few drawbacks. First, data science can be used to create new insights
for social science by taking advantage of big data collection, machine learning analytic
approaches, cloud computing paradigms, and online interactive visualization tools. Second,
data science can improve the reproducibility of social science by encouraging adoption of …