A Consumer’s Guide to Understanding Data - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 47

Chapter 4
A Consumer's Guide
to Understanding
Data
One muggy midsummer night in the 1960s, Andy Warhol pointed a
camera at the top of the Empire State Building to record an experi-
mental film he called Empire . For more than 6 hours, as dusk fell on
New York's most famous building, the camera's eye captured the
long transition from day to night and the mundane details of lights
flickering on and off its exterior (Figure 4-1).
This film is the essence of data; its unique capability to be more patient and
more omniscient than you or I can be in our observations of the world. Data
captures actions and characteristics of the real world and transforms them into
something that can be examined and explored after the fact. And like Warhol's
film, when recording data, we must always consider perspective—where the
lens is pointed and what lies outside the frame.
Today, unblinking lenses record where and when we shop, what we buy, when
we travel, and what media we consume. Thousands of security cameras qui-
etly film their own version of Empire every night. Our opinions are captured
explicitly through surveys, and our interests are inferred through data that
captures our behavior.