Curating Data

Data is an ever growing part of this world. The need to understand and formulate the data is therefore more important than ever.
The knowledge pyramid is a well known concept, where we have data based on the world (Kitchen 2022, 11-14). From data comes information, knowledge and wisdom. The concept is that wisdom is based on knowledge and knowledge is based on information that you get from data. This makes data fundamental in understanding the world.
This makes the curation of data an important tool in shaping the world, because it will impact on how people view and understand the world.
The Collection below is the ideas and work throughout the course in Curating Data. Go through the different faces of curating data, with collecting, categorizing, visualizing and archiving. This has been the final exercise in this course, where the data has been curated and presented on this website.

Collecting

Categorising

Visualizing

The translation of things into data, and the digitalization and quantification of things. The collection is always affected by the biases of the collector in the classification of the data.

Obsidian

Assignment 1 - Collecting Objects and building datasets

"Quantification, assigning quantity to something,
is not a simple, transparent act. It does not reveal absolute truth. Instead, quantification should be understood as an interpretive and
creative practice of world-making. "(Wernimont 2021, 428)

"data are never simply just data – pre-analytic and pre-factual; how data are conceived and used varies between those who capture, analyse and draw conclusions from them" (Kitchen 2022, 6)

Assignment 2 - Categorization

Obsidian

Assignment 3 -Visualising

"Classifications are powerful technologies. Embedded in working infrastructures they become relatively invisible without losing any of that power." (Bowker & Star 1999, 319)

"Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data - a matter of substance, of statistics and of design. " (Tufte 2007, 51)

"While not all forms of knowledge are firmly rooted in data – for example, conjecture,
opinions, beliefs – data are clearly a key base material for how we make sense of the world."

(Kitchen 2022, 14)

Categorizing and classifying objects are practices, filled with biases from the person sorting the objects into the categories. There is, however, no clear solution to remove all biases from this practice.

Visual analytics are the processing of datasets making them into visual materials that are more easily interpreted by the viewer them a large set numbers or other data.