Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 15
The Students Speak
Every algorithm is editorial.
— Emily Bell (director of the
Tow Center for Digital Jour‐
nalism at Columbia's Graduate
School of Journalism)
We invited the students who took Introduction to Data Science version
1.0 to contribute a chapter to the topic. They chose to use their chapter
to reflect on the course and describe how they experienced it. Con‐
tributors to this chapter are Alexandra Boghosian, Jed Dougherty,
Eurry Kim, Albert Lee, Adam Obeng, and Kaz Sakamoto.
Process Thinking
When you're learning data science, you can't start anywhere except the
cutting edge.
An introductory physics class will typically cover mechanics, electric‐
ity, and magnetism, and maybe move on to some more “modern” sub‐
jects like special relativity, presented broadly in order of ascending
difficulty. But this presentation of accumulated and compounded
ideas in an aggregated progression doesn't give any insight into, say,
how Newton actually came up with a differential calculus. We are not
taught about his process; how he got there. We don't learn about his
tools or his thoughts. We don't learn which topics he read or whether
he took notes. Did he try to reproduce other people's proofs? Did he
focus on problems that followed from previous writing? What exactly
made him think, “I just can't do this without infinitesimals?” Did
