Data with big ‘’D’’. What is data? How do we deal with it and what do we do with it?

In the last three weeks the term data was a ‘’hot’’ topic in the Library Science course in City, University London. The main questions which were looked upon were how do we organise and describe it, is data some form of document. We also touched upon the databases question, what is their function, how are they structured, how the data stored in them could be managed and curated. However, last but not least, was the problem of how do we go about looking and searching for information that we either need or we just want to learn about. It seemed this was a pretty self-explanatory problem in the present, when Google has turned from verb into a noun in our speech, if we use linguistic terminology.
It is almost impossible to imagine us as society without the data, which is in the core of everyday life and everything we do, if we go deeper it is hard to imagine us human beings existing without data, because we thrive on it and our world is based on it. We can also say that the data is the nucleus to the information cell, using biology terms.
The problem with the data collection, storage and manipulation is not a new one to our society, even four decades ago, in the 1970s it became clear that the human being cannot cope alone with all the volume of data that was poured at him and he will need some kind of assistance provided by technical means. This concept was developed Chile, then under a socialist government led by Salvador Allende. The concept inception came about with the thought how the production can be rationalised, one of the main goals and aims of the Communist Bloc governments and Socialist countries at that point of history.
Around this time, the 1970s, another change occurred in the world the information science had become the dominant term used in describing the processes of collecting, indexing and making available materials in a given subject replacing the term ‘documentation’. However, decade later the Neo-Documentation movement arose and in 1996 Norway established Institute of Documentation Studies at University of Tromso.
Nowadays when Google has become not just a term for a specific website on the internet but a noun denoting search – ‘’I will google it!’ it is easy to gloss over the problem of looking for information. We need to understand that the search for data & information is not just limited to ‘’Googling it’’. There are many other ways we can find information beyond the google search engine which is now so ubiquitous. Maybe we can turn back the history a bit and start looking at books for information? This might show us that although Google is the easiest, most convenient tool at our disposal for information search, Google is not the only one in existence and that there might be others which could be more precise, not just books but also digital in the realm of so called world wide web.
In conclusion we can say that the data is the core of everything or is in the core of everything. I will continue with these trains of thoughts in a future blog posts.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Morozov, Evgeny; The Planning Machine, Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation. (The New Yorker Oct 13th, 2014.) –  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine