Interesting Articles
Data is when... or Do we understand well what data, information, knowledge is?
When building large research infrastructures and collecting large scientific data, we should always keep in mind what we are dealing with so that we are not surprised by what we get. If we compare a scientist to a baker who bakes cakes, we need good quality flour, which we use with the help of other ingredients to make a dough, and this dough becomes the basis of the final cake. The scientist therefore collects quality data (flour), interprets it, i.e. creates information (dough), and places this information in the context of existing knowledge, thus producing scientific piece of knowledge (cake).
This procedure is often carried out in a largely unconscious, informal way, using so-called tacit, i.e. hidden, unexpressed (and inexpressible) knowledge, so that an attempt to capture it in a fully comprehensive way is doomed to failure. And such is the nature of this process not only in the humanities, but in any field of human knowledge. Trying to capture this bird will inevitably end in my no longer studying a living creature, but only its corpse. After all, that is how the goals of the seekers of universal language (Raimundus Lullus, G. W. Leibniz and others) ended - and data analysts could learn from their results.
One of these lessons might be: Capture not only the data, but also all potentially useful circumstances of its acquisition, structurally described by what is called metadata and paradata. Example: If I measure the air temperature, I write down the appropriate value in my science journal, e.g. 21.8. This is the data. I need to add some additional data (metadata) to this data to interpret it (i.e., "make" information out of it) and to make it reusable by other researchers, perhaps in the distant future. That is, I will capture what scale, what instrument, when, where, under what weather conditions, at what altitude, in what environment (city/country) I measured. There may in fact be tens, hundreds or thousands (!) of these parameters for each individual data.
While data (as record) and information (as meaning) are found formalized in various information sources, knowledge (as context) is found somewhat elsewhere. Namely, in our head. In the ever-mysterious microcosm called the brain lies a variable and different representation of what we call the world. This is also why data and information are "just" a tool - a tool for the knowledge growth of an individual, an institution, a society.
Author of text: Mgr. Josef Schwarz, CIT FF MU
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