Confident Data Skills

You leave a “data exhaust” trail others can collect and analyze.

Scientists define big data relative to current hardware and software. They base their definitions on the three “Vs”:

1. Volume – In the billions of rows.
2. Velocity – The speed of gathering data.
3. Variety – The types of data included.

Museums, governments and companies all gathered data for years – in the form of hard copies – before the technology emerged to collect, store and analyze it. Data science relies on technology, but stories built of data nuggets are at its core, since data in whatever form tells the story of a culture. When you post on social media, drive past a security camera or shop online, you create “data exhaust” – the information used by data analytics. Businesses, governments and individual researchers have multiple ways to collect your data exhaust, an extremely important commodity. As The Economist reported in 2017, “Data has superseded oil as the world’s most valuable resource.”

Use the five-step “...