Data Science and What It Means to Library and Information Science

Data Science and What It
Means to Library and
Information Science
Jian Qin
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
iSpeaker Series at Sungkyunkwan University
Seoul, Korea, December 8, 2015

Agenda
• What is data science?
• What is a data scientist?
• What areas of library work can benefit from data
science?
212/8/2015 iSpeaker Series at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

3
•
What is data science?
“An emerging area of work
concerned with the collection,
presentation, analysis,
visualization, management, and
preservation of large collections
of information.”
Stanton, J. (2012). Introduction to Data Science.
http://ischool.syr.edu/media/documents/2012/3/DataScienc
eBook1_1.pdf
The whole lifecycle of data from collection to analysis
to preservation
LCAS DM workshop, Beijing, 201512/8/2015 iSpeaker Series at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

“We’re increasingly
finding data in the wild,
and data scientists are
involved with gathering
data, massaging it into a
tractable form, making it
tell its story, and
presenting that story to
others.”
Loukides, M. (2011). What is data science? Sebastopol, CA:
O’Reilly.
What is data science?
4
Gathering and massaging data to tell its story

5
A systematic enterprise that builds and
organizes knowledge in the form of
testable explanations and predictions.
The study of the generalizable extraction of knowledge
from data, which involves data and statistics or the
systematic study of the organization, properties, and
analysis of data and its role in inference, including our
confidence in the inference.
Dhar, V. (2013). Data science and prediction. Communications of the ACM, 56(12): 64-73.

Why is data science different from
statistics and other existing disciplines?
• Raw material, the “data” part of data science, is
increasingly heterogeneous and unstructured and often
emanating from networks with complex relationships
between the entities.
• Analysis of data requires integration, interpretation, and
sense making that is increasingly derived through tools
from computer science, linguistics, econometrics,
sociology, and other disciplines.
• Data are increasingly generated by computer and for
computer consumption, that is, computers increasingly
do background work for each other and make decisions
automatically

7
Dhar, V. (2013). Data science and prediction. Communications of the ACM,
56(12): 64-73, p. 64.

8
Main fields in data science

What is a data scientist?
• Math skills: Statistics and linear algebra
• Computing skills: programming and infrastructure design
• Able to communicate: ability to create narratives around
their work
• Ask the right questions: involves domain knowledge and
expertise, coupled with a keen ability to see the problem,
see the available data, and match up the two.

Analysis of data problems: Story 1
• Domain: Global migration studies
• What’s involved: migrants, refuges, detention centers, refuge
camps, Asylums, …
• Data types: interview audio recordings, photos, articles, clippings,
written notes, …
• Analysis software: Atlas.ti, SPSS
• Bottleneck problem:
• difficulty in finding the data by person, interview, and related artifacts and in
transforming the data into analysis software
We’ve got
a problem
Researcher:
How to use
Atlas.ti?
Data scientist:
What data do
you have?
Data scientist:
How do you
collect them?
Data scientist:
What do you do
with the data?

Analysis of data problems: story 2
• Domain: Thermochronology and tectonics
• Data types: Excel data files (lots of them), spectrum and microscopic images,
annotations
• Analysis: modeling by combining data from multiple data files with specialized
software
• Bottleneck problem:
• manually matching/merging/filtering data is extremely cumbersome and the problem is
compounded by the difficulty finding the right data files
What is involved: workflows in a
research lifecycle

Analysis of data problem: story 3
• Domain: collaboration networks in a data repository
• What’s involved: metadata describing DNA sequences
• Data types: semi-structured data in plain text format
• Analysis: identify entities and relationships, build the
data into a database for querying and extraction
• Bottleneck problems:
• Extremely large data sets with multiple entities, which makes
manual processing impossible
• Disambiguation of author names and correctly linking between
entities

Analysis of data problems
Analysis of
domain data
Requirement analysis
Workflow analysis
Data modeling
Data transformation
needs analysis
Data provenance
needs analysis
Analysis of data problems is an
analysis of domain data,
requirements, and workflows
that will lead to the
development of solutions.

Skills required to perform
analysis of domain data problems
Requirement
analysis
Workflow
analysis
Data modeling
Data
transformation
needs analysis
Data
provenance
needs analysis
Interview skills,
analysis and
generalization skills
Ability to capture
components and
sequences in workflows
Ability to translate
domain analysis into
data models
Ability to envision the data
model within the larger
system architecture

Example 1: modeling research data for
gravitational wave research
15
1. Understand research lifecycle
2. Workflows: steps and relationships
3. Data flows: what goes in and out at
which step
4. Entities and attributes, relationships
5. Researcher’s practice and habits in
documenting and managing data

Example 2: asking the right question in
mining metadata
16
Metadata describing
datasets is big data that can
used to study:
• Collaboration networks
• Scholarly
communication patterns
• Research frontiers and
trends
• Knowledge transfer
• Research impact
assessment

What areas of library work can
benefit from data science?

Data services and data-driven services
18
Library
Data services that
support research,
learning, and policy
making (external)
Data-driven services
that support library
planning, management,
and evaluation
(internal)
Data literacy
training
Data
discovery
Data
consulting
Data
mining
Data
collection Data
integration

Data-drive organization
• Consumer internet companies
• Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Brick-mortar companies:
• Walmart, UPS, FedEx, GE
• “A data-driven organization
acquires, processes, and
leverage data in a timely fashion
to create efficiencies, iterate on
and develop new products, and
navigate the competitive
landscape...”
19
Is your library
(company, research
center, etc.) a data-
driven organization?
Patil, D.J. & Mason, H. (2015). Data Driven: Creating a Data
Culture. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, p. 6.

Data curation
20
“the active and ongoing management of
data through its life cycle of interest and
usefulness to scholarship, science, and
education. Data curation activities enable
data discovery and retrieval, maintain its
quality, add value, and provide for reuse
over time, and this new field includes
authentication, archiving, management,
preservation, retrieval, and representation.”
–UIUC GSLIS

Data collection
• Build data collections through
• Institutional repositories
• Community repositories
• Developing tools for researchers to submit,
manage, preserve, and discover data
• Develop data collections
• Specialized
• Analysis-ready
• Reusable
• Actionable
21
• For library service planning, decision
making, and evaluation
• To support policy making, research, and
learning

Data discovery
• Complex data landscape:
• International, national, regional
• Disciplinary, community
• Open access vs. closed access
• Data sources for various purposes:
• Utility data sources: open, reusable
• Census data: open, but need additional
processing/meshing to reach the analysis-
ready state
• Government data: open, reusable, but require
additional processing
• Disciplinary research data: access varies,
require special knowledge to access and use
22
Data involving human
subjects are under
strict control by law
and often follow
additional compliance

Data consulting
• Search, locate, and verify data for
particular research purposes
• Plan, design, and implement data
curation and/or data analysis
projects
• Provide training and consulting for
statistical methods and tools

Data mining
• Using internal data:
• Users, uses, expenses, collections, staff
• Goal: improve efficiencies and service
quality
• Using external data:
• Trends and indicators in scholarly
communication, technology, economy, and
culture
• Goal: adjust current services and plan for
new services

Data integration
Data integration is the combination of technical
and business processes used to combine data
from disparate sources into meaningful and
valuable information.
--IBM, http://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/technology/data-
integration/
25
A process of understanding, cleansing,
monitoring, transforming, and delivering data,
which offers opportunities to develop data
products as an infrastructure for research,
learning, policymaking, and decision making.

A home buyer’s information integration
26
What houses for sale under $250K have at least 2 bathrooms, 2
bedrooms, a nearby school ranking in the upper third, in a
neighborhood with below-average crime rate and diverse population?
Information
integration
Realtor School rankings Crime rate Demographics

Research data
integration
Diabetes data and
trends—Country
level estimates:
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/D
DT_STRS2/NationalDiabet
esPrevalenceEstimates.aspx
?mode=PHY ;
Diabetes Data &
Trends home page:
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/dd
tstrs/default.aspx
12/8/2015 27iSpeaker Series at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

Summary
• Data science is not a new discipline, but rather, a new way of
utilizing data, methods, and tools to ask the right questions in
solving problems.
• Practicing data science requires strong skills in math,
computing, interpersonal communication, and asking the right
questions
• Libraries are at a strategic position in practicing data science.
How to leverage this position relies on the
• vision
• courage of risk taking
• knowledge of data science and related topics
• careful planning
• collaboration

12/8/2015 iSpeaker Series at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea 29
Thank you!
Questions?

Data Science and What It Means to Library and Information Science

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