Simon Carryer is a data scientist at Xero, a cloud accounting software company. In this talk, he explores the idea of data as a soft science.

"As much as we might want to believe that data science is a pure hard science, about writing greek letters on chalkboards and stroking our chins, the truth is that what we do is more usefully thought of as a social science. Data science is a lens for understanding human behaviour. It is a tool for communicating with people. This talk is about how my background in Social Anthropology gave me a different approach to doing data science. Data science problems, I believe, are mostly about how to understand humans. Data is a soft science."