Data Viz Reflection

I always find it extremely how paradoxical the nature of data visualization or collection is. We often collect/analyze data to find some sort of objective truth involving a data set. However, what we choose to examine is often not objective at all, in fact the act of choosing what to analyze and how to analyze it makes this a very subjective realm to begin with. For example, if we were trying to find out how happy factory workers are at their job, we might send out a survey and ask them how happy they are on a scale of 1 to 10. However, the numbers we would get in return, would be very subjective as well. We would be getting back subjective data about how the workers perceived their own happiness levels, while a more objective and accurate metric of happiness might be how much money that worker spends on other people. This is what Mimi was getting at when speaking about how the process of data collection can never be considered separate from the results.

Looking to our project and the data we collected on Haolin, I realized that it actually distanced me from her in a lot of ways. Chris and I analyzed her table tennis wins, losses and rating over time. As we compared Haolin's rating trend over time to that of other table tennis players, she became less of an individual. Her curve matched that of many others: a very steep curve early on of rapid rating improvement, and then a gradual slow and plateau. Although Haolin undoubtedly has an individual playing style, and unique strengths and weaknesses when playing, all of this is lost when doing this type of analysis. This made me realized that there are also many asymmetries in what data we have access to. As mentioned in The Greatest Number, it does take a lot of power to collect data..... sometimes. Chris and I were able to look up this information quite rapidly online. The availability of knowledge created streams and trends of power in data analysis potential.