Dear Students,

We are not in a vacuum! As you know, part of the philosophy of this course is to draw inspiration from the real world- including guest speakers and messy data sets. We also try to create some academic distance- we are not fully immersed in the “real world”- and develop and form our own ideas, theories and opinions around Data Science. At the same time, the real world is not oblivious to our existence.

Here are four recent examples:

(1) For a previous assignment, you responded to Maxwell Anderson’s “Metrics of Success in Museums” paper. You wrote in comments to a blog post, “The Data Science of Art”, about how museums could utilize Data Science, and Anderson, Director of the Dallas Art Museum has responded! He wrote in a comment at the end of all your comments:

I appreciate the thoughtful offerings of those involved in Dr. Schutt’s course, and am certain that much more can be brought to the evaluation of museum performance than my original essay intended to add. The advent of social media in particular–which was at best a fledgling phenomenon in 2004–has radically shifted not only means of communicating, but also it has upended institutional authority, rendering the top-down culture of art museums in many respects obsolete.

Without teasing too much, I will pass on that the Dallas Museum of Art will announce, at the end of November, a series of steps to change our operations that will be very germane to the concerns of your course.

You can read more in his comment. And feel free to comment back!

(2) The New York Philharmonic took notice.

(3) Forbes magazine liked guest speaker Matt Gattis’ heist analogy.

(4) In the event that you still have some questions about why I created this course, and my thoughts around the emergence of data science, here is a recent interview on the Google Research +Page.

Yours, Rachel