Presenting Data

Importance of Data in Today's Age

In our daily life we come across data of all kinds. We absorb data through our 5 senses. We hear a lot of conversations, see (read) the newspaper, TV and our smart phones, discuss many topics with our friends & professional colleagues, smell & identify a lot of familiar scents and feel the weather through our skin. In fact we can say we are flooded with data.

But our brain automatically filters most of the data and focusses only on data which may be relevant to us. So if we are planning to buy a refrigerator, our attention will focus on advertisements & new items relating to refrigerators while ignoring others.

But the world is changing rapidly. A startling piece of information is that almost 90% of the data that we use today was generated in the last 2 years! That is the effect of computers & digitization.

Today we are almost drowned in data. Unless we understand the data & interpret it, we will choke.

An important aspect of our education has to be the understanding of data.

Most of the data which is useful to us also needs to be presented in a structured way so that we can quickly gather the information that we want. We can say information is organized data. Organizing data into information makes it more useful to us.

Let us take the example of data on train schedules which we need to plan a train trip. If you open a train schedule book, we will see that the data has been organized in terms of a table, with vertical columns & horizontal rows. There is also an index where train numbers or names are arranged either by number or alphabetically which will allow us to locate the particular table which we need to refer. As against this imagine the difficulty if all the train details given like a continuous news report!

Hence one of the basic ways to organize data is in terms of tables & indexes.

Indexing

Every book we refer to usually has a chapter index in the beginning & a topic index at the back. The chapter index is usually arranged by chapter numbers and the particular page where the chapter commences.

The topic index has a list of all topics arranged alphabetically. Against each topic the page numbers where that topic is dealt with are listed. The term “topic” has a very wide meaning here. It could include names of important characters in that book, dates and even important events covered in the book.

Table

Imagine the marks scored by students of a class in 5 or 6 subjects in an examination. The marks of each student in each subject have to be documented and later aggregated. At each stage the data has to be arranged so that final aggregation is easy. The aggregated data is usually presented in a table where the marks of each student in each subject is entered in a row, against the name of the student. Each column represents the marks in each subject.

You will recognize that this is very similar to the format of a sheet in a spreadsheet software.

In this table we can compare the performance of a particular student in the different subject or the marks scored in a particular subject by all students. We will study in the next chapter, the ways in which data in such a table can be analysed & interpreted.

The table idea can be used in a variety of situations which students can relate to. A birthday chart is a table which could indicate the students by the month in which their birthday falls. The weekly time-table of a class itself is a table. The annual calendar of a school is another example. Students can relate to the data in these tables and can respond to queries which need analyzing these tables.

Graphs

Data presented as visual graphs can convey the meaning immediately. One of the most effective is a Pie Chart.