Data, Information, and Haunted Houses

In this business, there’s a lot of terms that seem to get used interchangeably. Most of the time, that’s all right. I had a communication professor in college that reinforced that the key metric for determining success in communicating was whether or not the recipient, well, understood the message. To that end, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as Shakespeare might say.

One place where I do tend to be a bit of a stickler, though, is in trying to reinforce the idea of data versus information. To me (and plenty of other people) they’re not the same thing, and it’s important to think of them separately.

So. What is data?

Data is (or are, depending on whether you think it’s a plural word or not) a collection of raw figures and facts. It’s not organized, doesn’t have context, and is ripped right from the source. There’s been no processing, no interpretation, no sort of distillation of these numbers, letters, pixels, or whatever.

Information, on the other hand… well, now, that’s where we’re starting to get somewhere. Data that has been organized into a particular structure or framework; or processed in a particular way; or interpreted according to some set of rules? That is information now.

As data professionals, a lot of us tend to think about data in a way that is limited to tables, rows, and columns. But let’s take “data” and “information” and think about it in another context.

Let’s imagine that you’ve thrown caution to the wind and you’re walking through a haunted house. It’s dark, it’s creaky and creepy inside, and you’re looking around every corner twice before taking a step. After a half hour of this, you see the exit just up ahead. You let your guard down just for a moment. Then suddenly… everything changes.

All you see is a flash of light as something brown and hairy moves through your field of vision, and all you hear is a loud noise emanating from the same direction.

Bright. Brown. Hairy. Moving. Loud. That’s data.

In the moments following the initial shock, you’re able to process what you’re seeing and hearing. You put it in the context of where you are, what you’re doing. You compare it to existing classification structures - brown, hairy, moving, loud - and you start to put together what’s happening. It’s a werewolf howling at you.

That’s information.

You’ll note that neither of these things is equivalent to “intelligence”. Suffice it to say, intelligence would be not entering the haunted house in the first place.