A Brief History of Data and Data Science

Data science as we know it today is an interdisciplinary subject where a number of different disciplines and techniques meet. It is a highly dynamic discipline, rapidly evolving and strongly influenced by technological developments (e.g., in terms of data processing infrastructure) and conceptional advances (e.g., machine learning frameworks and platforms), but at the same time with roots that go back several hundred years. In this chapter, we start by giving a brief overview of the historical events and aspects with particular relevance for today’s field of data science. It will be seen that a number of concepts (such a Ockham’s razor) have survived the centuries and still have their place in data science. However, data science as we know it today could only develop in the last third of the twentieth century; it is a child of many different scientific disciplines, old and new.