Data
&
Analysis

Now

people know that to answer their questions

they need information,

which involves collecting data

and organising it, and displaying it in ways to help interpret it.

They get data from looking at stuff

and getting their information from their eyes and other senses,

and from that data drawing their conclusions.

And that data can come from a sequence of things,

or a set of things,

from information that is already there,

or perhaps from the results of a scientific experiment.

They look for the data to answer questions that they have,

and with any luck they might even find that answers show up

for questions they hadn't thought of asking

that might change the way they think about their questions.

And they have to think about the source of the data,

when asking questions of people,

for instance, whether there is anything

that might make the group being questioned similar to each other

but possibly different from another group,

like are they all the same age,

or do they all live in the same place.

There is a lot going on when data is being collected,

and everything can't be brought down to a simple yes or no answer.

And a questionnaire

with multiple possible answers

still restricts the range of response,

but then again,

when people answer questions in their own words

they may well be using the same words

but understanding different meanings.

Sometimes there's not a lot of data to consider.

Prisoners may simply be making scratches in the walls of their cells

to make a tally of the days as they pass,

whereas others use computers

to take all manner of different information,

arrange it under different headings or fields,

and look at the way that it interacts,

and see what patterns they can find.

And of course, computers also make it easy

to display information in different ways,

in all sorts of different kinds of tables, graphs and charts.

Computers can do so much more than keep a set of files or folders in alphabetical order,

making it easy to find an individual file when you need it,

they can also link through files to look at how data is shared between them.

They can look for what is similar

and what stands out,

look for means, medians and ranges.

They can search using logical operators,

like "and" and "or" or "not"

or not

And because computers make it so easy

to record and display such vast amounts of data,

it makes it clear that the most important contribution a human has to make

is to ask questions,

and to see if changing the display of what is known

either answers those questions or throws up new ones.

When searching for knowledge,

the human contribution is curiosity and imagination,

that place where questions come from.