How Data Happened: Professors Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones on the History of Data
Tides of History
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Data and Ethics in the 19th Century
In the 19th century, you start seeing immediately debates about whether or not data should be allowed to be part of the discussion about running the state. Cat Lea is one of the first people to start collecting and analyzing data about the rates of crimes - these things that he's quite explicit have a moral character. The third thing is by the end of the 19th Century, the importation of mathematical sophistication. And so a number of people, particularly from the sciences, said, why don't we take these methods that are clearly so good and use them for real important stuff like society?
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