Like a lot of people I have been thinking about writing, writing a blog which will depict my passion and maybe in some little way connect with at least one person of the 7.4 billion human beings (I am limiting this blog to only those species that can read this language) that reside on this planet earth.

Writing isnt easy. It starts with thinking about a topic, finding content, developing a strong belief and publishing that. It doesn’t stop there. After your first post, you have to keep writing, keep the readers interested,because you don’t want to be that wanna be who was writing a blog only because it is cool to do so. I am doing this, because it provides me and million other bloggers, a platform to share their ideas with the world.

Now, coming to the topic of what I want to write about – I want to write about data. About the solace I get when I am working with a dataset, struggling to first convert it in the format that I can work with easily (I call it taming the dataset), then asking the the question to the given dataset (I call it the data curiosity phase) and making an attempt to find an answer (I call it the data investigation phase). The satisfaction derived from finding an answer to the question I posed to the dataset is immense. Many may look at this activity as a job of a data analyst’s or if it involves some fancy quantitative maneuvering , a data scientist’s. But I like to look at this work as that of a data psychologist. Someone who not only understands what data is trying to say, but also someone who gets where it is coming from, who created it, what are its biases, its limitations and why it is in the format as one can see. This job not only requires to be a quantitative researcher but also an artist who is creative enough to ask innovative questions to the dataset to reveal things that the dataset itself wasn’t aware of.

I look at data as a living entity. Someone who is the child of its generators (mainly human beings, unless its a dataset generated by machines such as sensors). It imbibes the qualities and features of its creators. It shares biases, fears, anxieties, traditions and culture with its generators. It gives me pleasure to understand that and use the findings in a way that may seem obvious from the first look however were never used in those trivial looking ways ever before.

Data can be misunderstood in so many ways. I want to be someone who tries to dissolve those misunderstandings. In want to play the advocate of data, after all it is us who is generating it, it is our by product and i feel a sense of responsibility towards it.