What is Data?

Data is information - any kind of information that comes in all different shapes and sizes. Although the term is used in different ways, it often refers to information in digital form. 

But what does this really mean?
Data can refer to a variety of different things. 

Ballot Box with Ballot You may hear data discussed in connection with public opinion polls or election results. 

Hospital Data may be collected in a healthcare setting to try to determine the cause of an illness. 

Bank You may give your financial data to a banking advisor so that they can manage your accounts. 

Shopping Cart Google collects data about your visits to e-commerce websites to show you advertisements. 

Identification Card The government conducts a census every five years to collect data about the Canadian population and demographics. 

The fact is, we encounter data in almost all our daily activities. 


Physical vs. Digital Data 

Data can be collected, or produced, by a wide variety of devices and activities. It can range from interviews and surveys, to photographs and drawings, to measurements and time-series of sensor readings.

There are two kind of records that can have data:

  • Physical records: These are tangible files - something you can physically hold in your own hands. For example, measurements you took down in a notebook or a physical photograph are physical records of data.

  • Digital records: These are electronically generated files that are stored on a digital medium, such as a computer or a mobile device. For example, emails, spreadsheets, presentation slides, videos, electronic maps and 3D models are digital records of data.

Over the past few decades, everyday life, businesses, and the wider economy have undergone a shift towards larger amounts of digital record keeping. But why is this digitization process happening?

It’s a lot more than simply “keeping up with the times”.
By 2019, economic activity in the digital sector made up almost the same share of Canada’s economy as mining, oil and gas combined (source:  Bank of Canada ).

And this extends well beyond tech industries - the impact of digital transformation has offered real economic and efficiency benefits to all kinds of service providers, like banks, government agencies, manufacturers, shipping companies, retailers, telecommunication firms, and more. Individuals are digitizing their lives too!
From 2018 to 2020, the number of Canadians over 15 years old who were classified as non-users, or basic users, of the Internet and digital technologies decreased by 4.8 percentage points, while those classified as advanced users increased by 4.5 percentage points (source:  Statistics Canada ). 


So what makes digital data different?

Simply put, digital data can be managed and processed by computers. This opens up a range of new possibilities and enables new technological innovations. But the computability of digital data also leads us to other properties of data that we’ll get into later in this module - aggregated data, big data and the data lifecycle. 

You might ask, weren’t these capabilities available prior to digitization? And the answer is…. perhaps…. but to a much smaller degree. 

Moving from a notebook to an Excel spreadsheet to a database is a huge change and offers a ton of benefits. Having data stored in a flexible electronic format like a database allows for calculations, analytics and advanced machine learning, or artificial intelligence, to be applied to the data. This means it is possible to identify patterns in the data and can enable people to make better-informed business decisions, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.



Next:  📓⁠⁠Categorizing Data⁠