What Is Data

Data is anything you record about the world. A score. A name. A weight. A timestamp. A photo. By itself, a number sitting in a notebook does not mean much. The number 87 could be a temperature, a cricket score, the price of a kilo of tomatoes in Anarkali, or your aunt's age. Data on its own is just marks on a page. Information is what you get when data is placed in a context that explains what the marks are about. Data is the raw stuff. Information is the meaning we lift out of it.

Take a cricket scorecard, the kind you saw on PTV during the last Pakistan-Australia test. Each row has a batter's name, runs scored, balls faced, fours, sixes, and how she got out. Every cell in that table is one piece of data. Babar Azam, 81, 124, 9, 1, caught at slip. Six pieces of data per row, eleven rows for a full innings. The scorecard by itself is data. The moment a commentator says, Babar's strike rate today is lower than his career average against pace, the scorecard has become information. Same numbers. New context. The information was hiding inside the data the whole time, waiting for a question.

A closer example. You use Easypaisa or JazzCash. Every time you send fifty rupees to your cousin, every time you pay your bijli bill, every time you top up your Jazz number, a row is created. Sender number, receiver number, amount, time, type, status. Six fields per transaction. A small Easypaisa shopkeeper in Faisalabad might do four hundred such transactions in a day. The shopkeeper sees them as just today's work. The system in Karachi sees them as data. From that data the company learns who sends money to whom, when bills are paid, where shops are busiest, which areas need more cash float. You did not feel like you were giving them anything. You were. Every tap on a phone is a row.

Data has a quality. Good data is accurate, complete, timestamped, and recorded the same way every time. Bad data has missing fields, wrong spellings, mismatched units, or no time on it. A class teacher who writes attendance in a notebook with a pencil that smudges, sometimes marks A for absent and sometimes a dash, sometimes forgets the date, has bad data. The numbers are there but you cannot trust them. A class teacher who marks attendance in the same column, with the same letter, every morning at the same time, has good data. After a year, you can answer real questions from her notebook. Whose attendance fell after Eid. Which day of the week has the most absences. The first teacher wrote down events. The second teacher built a record.

What this means for you. For the rest of your life, data will be collected on you, and around you. Your phone, your bank, your school, your hospital, the FBR, your employer one day. You can either treat this as something happening over your head, or you can learn how to be on the other side of it. The other side is the side that designs the form, picks the fields, asks the questions, and decides what counts. Pakistan needs more people on that side. The next lesson takes one short step further. We will look at how separate pieces of data, scattered across phones and offices and forms, get connected to each other through networks.