This is the first popular nonfiction book to explore the definition of data and how we can learn to speak this language, featuring thought-provoking conversations with 17 exceptional leaders in business, technology, medicine, psychology, health, art, and more, who share new ideas about data, revealing its powerful power to reveal patterns, tell stories, evoke emotion, and illustrate complexity.Data may be the most powerful force in our society today. Data is present everywhere, in every moment, in every event, in every transaction, and in every interaction with others. Every time you send a text message, call a friend, fill out a form, order a taxi, watch a movie, surf the Internet, pay a bill, groceries, buy anything, take your temperature, count your steps, or swipe the screen right (or left), you are generating data.There is data in the weather, in the air, on Earth, and in outer space. If you have a smartwatch, you carry data on your body. If you have a pacemaker, you carry data in your body.So, what is data really? It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. For some, data means numbers: shapes on a screen, points on a graph. They are also often (wrongly) equated with facts, as a fixed form of concrete knowledge that always tells us the truth. But in reality, the data is not that certain.Data is an abstraction of reality, a useful but incomplete representation of real life. Like life, it is full of subtleties, imprecision, and ambiguity. It is quantity and quality. It is created by us humans.
These are some of the ideas that information designers Georgia Luby and Philip Cox explore in their brilliant new book Speak Data: Artists, Scientists, Thinkers and Dreamers on How We Live Our Lives in Numbers.Speak Data invites us to look at data differently, not just as numbers on a graph, but as a way to understand who we are and how we relate to one another, how we are interconnected, and how we perceive the world. The book is based on the principles of “data humanity,” a concept developed by co-author and award-winning information designer, Georgia Luby, that focuses on people, not numbers, in its visualization of data.In this beautifully illustrated book, the authors present data as a vocabulary that anyone can use, explaining that when we truly learn to "speak the language of data," we can open up new worlds of meaning about ourselves and all that surrounds us.
