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The value of data and data visualisations

Whether you’re writing an email, checking your tweets, streaming some music, or Googling life’s most important questions, such as “Can dogs see colours?”, these routine online actions generate large amounts of data. Usually, without us even being aware of it.

Not along ago, a business would make money on the internet simply by selling access to their services, programs, or applications. However, as competition has increased and purchasing trends have changed, more and more of these products are now being offered for free. This isn’t because these businesses are suddenly feeling more charitable, they’re still turning a profit. They’ve just worked out another way to make money. Can you guess what it is?

The use of advertising goes some way to enable a business to offer their programs and tools for free, but it’s disruptive and isn’t the most lucrative. By far and away, the biggest facilitator is the data we generate when using their tools and apps. That data is worth far more than any fee we would choose to pay. If you know what to do with it, data has a lot of value.

Whether or not you were aware that you leave a digital footprint as we browse the internet, most people would be surprised at how large that footprint is. The amount of data we all generate on a daily basis is staggering.

Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 6.0 gives us an idea of the volume. Their report predicts that by 2020 every person on earth will generate 1.7 megabytes of data every single second. That’s 146.88 gigabytes a day. According to ScienceNewsForStudents’ calculations, that’s the equivalent of all the words from a shelf of books that’s over 2.6 kilometres long.

Population Pyramid estimates that the world’s population by 2020 will be around 7.76 billion people. This means the total volume of data generated on a daily basis would be 1.14 zettabytes. If 1.2 zettabytes of data were to be printed in book form, it would be able to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer 52 books deep. As the global population continues to grow, and more and more people gain access to the internet, those numbers will rise exponentially.

While those are some pretty huge numbers, what can be achieved with that data is even more impressive. For example, we use data to help us predict the future by identifying what people are looking for on an online store before they’ve even typed a query.

The problem is, in their raw form, most datasets are simply too large for us to comprehend.

Large numbers are difficult to get your head around. Trying to draw comparisons between two of them is even harder. If you were to see two car parks, one with only 10 cars in it and one with 100, you’d easily be able to tell the difference. But, what if you saw a car park with 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, or even more cars? When dealing with volumes of things that have five or more digits our minds struggle to differentiate between them. Miller’s law, argues that the maximum number of object an average human mind can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. We need help when we’re dealing with large datasets.

To realise data’s true value, it is necessary to process and convert it into something that will allow you to see important information, to identify patterns, to understand difficult concepts, to get data-driven insights, and to ultimately make better decisions. Data visualisations are our allies.