Joshua Gladwin
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Why I want to be a Data Scientist

“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” — Sherlock Holmes

September is an incredibly busy month for me. During the first half of the month, I have to submit my Masters dissertation (on Vowel Harmony in Manchu, if you’re interested). In the second half, I’m packing up my life in London and moving to Berlin. This leaves me with a question — what the hell am I going to do in Berlin?

For many years, I’ve ended up working on several different tech projects with Chris. For a linguist, spending my weekends at Facebook competing (and winning) hackathons might seem like a strange way to spend my time. Staring at MySQL databases at 3am while trying to stay awake isn’t most people’s idea of fun. But what started out as a hobby has begun to encompass my whole life.

Back in 2013, Chris and I created LobbyALord, a tool to help people contact members of the House of Lords in support of same-sex marriage. With over 15,000 emails sent out and praise from both Stephen Fry and David Cameron, it was clear the enormous potential that using technology could have on politics. Since then, Chris and I have set up our own business, Gladward, working to, amongst other things, use technology and coding to influence policy and lawmakers.

Technology has started to play an increasingly important role in my studies of linguistics too. Through my dabbling in coding, I’ve become interested in computational linguistics. Linguistics can sometimes feel like a very old fashioned subject, leafing through 100 year old books on dead and forgotten languages. But tech is fast changing this. Nowadays, I’m more likely to be spending my time searching through databases and corpora filled with linguistic data. I’ve developed a particular interest in Natural Language Processing, which has involved picking up a fair bit of Python and XML.

And this brings me back to Berlin. Moving to a new country and a new city seems like the perfect time to take a new path in life. Drawing on the various experiences over the past six years, data science looks like a fascinating career to pursue. Linguistics has left me with a meticulous approach to analysing and manipulating data. Reading blogs from tech companies, the study of data is providing all sorts of exciting insights into the world, from population movements to what to say on a first date. This is just a tantalising glimpse of the information that can be found out through data science. The world is full of data and I can’t wait to see what sort of knowledge can be gleaned through studying it.

Joshua Gladwin

Written by

Linguist. Data Scientist. European. Liberal. Geek. Humanist.

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