ABSTRACT
This chapter maps the divisions and boundary markers that have driven the knowledge-building occupations of journalism and sociology apart for more than a century, but also trace the threads that still link George Vincent and Nate Silver's very different professional worlds. It explores the processes of boundary work through which academic sociology and journalism were constructed as separate professions in the period between the 1920s and 1950s. It examines a related process of expulsion through rhetorical 'othering', in this case, the changing sociological understanding of journalism between 1895 and 2000. The chapter sticks to a two-part analysis of the manner through which the profession of journalism discursively framed social science as well as its own relation to that science. The chapter concludes with a return to the present and to the world of modern data journalism, asking what we might understand about the knowledge boundaries of our own time in the light of this excavation of past practices.
