Data Science and Anthropology
Anthropology offers students the opportunity to explore data in cultural, biological and archaeological settings. Laboratories, field schools and classes provide hands-on training in both the collection and analysis of a variety of data that range from faunal remains, to biomarkers, plantation records, satellite imagery and much, much more. Despite these disparate datasets, anthropology emphasizes a holistic, comparative, and often evolutionary framework for working with primary data to ask broad questions about what it means to be human. At the same time, anthropologists conduct in-depth and grounded analyses (both qualitative and quantitative) of the human experience in order to inform the past, present, and future. In the end, anthropological analyses are applied to real-life issues in the communities in which we work with an emphasis on developing responsible data collection, curation and dissemination practices.