Reflective Post on What is Data?

I have never learned about data before, let alone thought about it and I’ll be honest at first I really was wondering what this class had to do with getting my English minor. After reading the first part of, “What is Data?” where it says ‘the idea of data, as a computer sees it’ I began to see why it is important.

Whenever I thought of data, I thought it was numbers or coding or something completely unimportant to my life. What I didn’t realize though is that data is something much more complex than that. Data is scalar and compound, it can be numbers and words and pictures, and more. Data is not as simple as the word itself seems.

I was looking around on the websites that we used for our activity Wednesday and found the most interesting data visualization. It is called The Hollywood In$ider and it is a bubble chart that reflects every major film from 2008-2016. This visualization uses dictionary compound data, list compound data, and scalar data.

At the top of the page, you are able to choose what you see on the Y-axis, the size of the film, what year the film was produced, the color of the bubble, and the legend. Compound data can be seen in each of these categories that list options. In the Y-axis there is dictionary compound data, in size, there are dictionary compound data, in the year there is list compound data to list the years, in the color of the bubble there is dictionary compound data, and in the legend, there is also dictionary compound data. We can see scalar data in the numbers represented on the X-axis and Y-axis, as well as when you click on the bubble. When you click on the bubble it reveals dictionary compound data (Average Critics %, Average Audience %, Worldwide Gross, Budget, and % Budget Recovered). Then within each of these, it reveals scalar data in the form of a number or percentage.

This is an incredibly detailed data visualization that does an incredible job of getting across the intended purpose. You are able to easily explore the visualization and interact with it by making it detailed to what you are interested in, looking for, or anything else. Whoever made this visualization put a lot of effort into making the data the most important part of this in every aspect.

After going through the visualizations on Wednesday and this visualization here, I feel like I have such a better understanding of data visualizations and data in and of itself.

Finally, the last thing I want to bring up that I began thinking about this week is why data matters to writing. Like I said earlier I don’t know much about data other than what we learned this week but after reading the articles and learning more about data and visualizations. Data is so important to writing because we could not write digitally without data. Without data to hold everything together and essentially be the glue, we could not write online and with how online our world is now, what would happen without data?

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