Data Analytics began with a big wonderful zero
Data are everywhere, and so is the need for understanding them
Since the invention of humanity – since we began communicating and considering each other to be needed and we therefore wanted to share both food, protection, and information with each other – we members of the human species have been producing and storing data.
The beginning of it all
It began in Africa, some say. Millions of years ago, monkeys turned into humans, or something like that. Now, humans are all over the Earth and at times even in space.
The more people we are, the more communication takes place – and the more data is produced, stored, and shared.
Data analytics as a discipline began much later, and the modern shape of it is closely related to the arrival of electronic computers, since these allow for gathering and processing data at a completely different level from what could be done previously with pen and paper.
Then it really took off!
The very first computers were without data until switched on, you could say – they were in a sense holding a big fat zero. When switched on, however, you could change that zero to a one, and soon the ambitions grew and more zero/one options were added, until today’s amounts that count in the millions, billions, trillions, or more. And of much importance, along the way mechanisms were developed and improved for storing the zeros and ones even when the computer would be switched off.
So now we have storage after storage of zeros and ones, nicely ordered to make up combinations known as numbers, letters, words, images, sound samples, and so forth: just about everything from the real world can be mapped into a pattern of zeros and ones treated by computers, and stored. These stored patterns we call data.
Now we try to understand
Here we are, doing exactly that: we store a lot. And during recent years many ideas have been investigated and many tools developed for making sense of all this data. There is so much of it, from so many sources, covering so many different aspects of the universe, life, and everything, that we can gain a lot of value by analysing it. We can find patterns and from these understand something new or enhancing our existing understanding of the data and thereby the world that the data comes from and, hence, is describing.
Data analytics helps us understand the world.
The blog
This blog is intended to be a valve through which I can release some of the excitement, learning points, and understanding that I reach in my journey through the data analytics multiverse with all of its facettes and parallel topics to dive into, wonder about, and, at times, get a bit scared about.
Sharing this wide view into the realm of data with some like-minded people makes it a bit less scary, and we can enjoy the beauty of it together.
There are of course theories of data analytics, methods for doing it, and tools that often become the practical basis of the work. Tools that can be investigated and described, for the benefit of both the investigator and the blog reader, I hope.
And there are topics such as methods that can help reaching results or simply make collaboration around data analysis work better. Also, data comes from somewhere so collection mechanisms are interesting, as well as how the results of the analyses are being used.
Important too are all the general aspects of working alone or together, managing, telling the story, and reflecting on what we are doing and how it affects ourselves and the world in both a small and a bigger context.
Artificial intelligence, AI, is somehow also data analytics, even though it can become something more with automated actions, decision making, simulation and so on. But the starting point for AI is data input, storage, analysis and then some kind of output.
So this Substack covers the world around data analytics in a broader sense, since this is how the universe works: in a broad sense. Everything is connected, any boundaries exist by definition only, they are not the nature of the universe.
Yours, sincerely
Oh, and who am I? I am Jorgen, your humble servant. I tend to believe that I also began with a zero and then I was switched on and learned a bit, and then a bit more, and so it went, like for all other people. Educated formally long ago in computer science but have added studies of leadership, various human languages, history, and more to my sphere of interests. I have worked with data analytics, software development, project management, people management, recruiting, writing and translation, plus various other things that happen in companies.
Currently, I am kind of a beginner in the data analytics space, as I have been before: people are changing, new tools appear, and new paradigms replace the old – what companies want is new each time I step into this space, so the blog will contain a mix of old and new experience. Probably often based on an understanding that is new to me but seems obvious and even a bit naive to others – or not naive at all but from a different time. To me, connecting the new with the known makes the universe complete.
Looking forward to share my thoughts with you and hear what you think!