Anthropology by Data Science

This essay explores how to broaden the scope of what constitutes anthropological and ethnographic research by cross-fertilizing with data science. I discuss four types of relationships anthropologists have sought to foster with data science: anthropology of data science, anthropology over data science, anthropology with data science, and, the least developed of the four, anthropology by data science. Data science as a field has cultivated abductive, bottom-up forms of quantitative research, which provide useful quantitative parallels to similarly abductive, bottom-up qualitative techniques in ethnographic research. Anthropologists should adopt an anthropology by data science perspective through incorporating machine-learning and other data science techniques into anthropological research. Nick Seaver's concept of bastard disciplines and methodologies provides a helpful framework for such work.