What is DATA?

Data is basically information; your name, your address, the time, a receipt. Digital data is that same data stored in a digital format. As technology advances our lives produce more and more data. With that same advancement, data storage becomes cheaper. Today data is being generated at exponential speeds. We create data every time we surf on the internet, drive a car, or purchase groceries.

Think about how much data a phone call generates. The number placing the call, the number receiving the call. The time the call was made, how long the call lasted. And even the location of the phones during the call.

See my post on how your location is tracked digitally.

There are different types of data and uses. Data can about any subject (or domain): customers, part numbers, inventory, sales transactions, web activities. And there are career opportunities that require experts in creating, moving, reporting, or analyzing data.

• Moving data is called ETL (extract, transform and load)
• Reporting data is called BI (business intelligent and is often a report or infographics)
• Data analysis interpret the data into insights or usable actions. They can answer a simple question that may be asked over and over by a company or very complex such as looking for new trends in mass quantities of transactions.

There are a variety of tools and formats used by BI: Some that you may have be familiar with are: Excel, Tableau, Micro Strategy.

The digital world consists of more than just data. There is content (ie this blog), images, programming/coding – all separate disciplines but they all work together with data. Think of a webpage. It is digital and consists of these digital components:

• Content – the text/words
• Images – the pictures, videos
• Programming – templates, formats, links
• Data – tags, keywords, url, data published, # of views

Little grammar fact: the word data is both singular and plural. And a collection of data is data. The correct grammar is ‘data are’ in some instances, but for easy of reading – we used the verb incorrectly.