You Say Data, I Say System

An over-simplified and dangerously reductive diagram of a data system might look like this

Collection → Computation → Representation

Whenever you look at data — as a spreadsheet or database view or a visualization, you are looking at an artifact of such a system. What this diagram doesn’t capture is the immense branching of choice that happens at each step along the way. As you make each decision — to omit a row of data, or to implement a particular database structure or to use a specific colour palette you are treading down a path through this wild, tall grass of possibility. It will be tempting to look back and see your trail as the only one that you could have taken, but in reality a slightly divergent you who’d made slightly divergent choices might have ended up somewhere altogether different. To think in data systems is to consider all three of these stages at once, but for now let’s look at them one at a time.

via https://medium.com/@blprnt/you-say-data-i-say-system–54e84aa7a421