Module 1. Defining Data: From Latin Roots to Digital Revolutions

Course 2: What is Data? Understanding the Building Blocks of Knowledge
Estimated Time: 20–25 minutes

🧭 Module Objectives

Explain the origin and multiple meanings of the word data.
Distinguish between data, information, and interpretation.
Describe how concepts of data have changed from ancient record-keeping to digital systems.
Recognize why data matters to the humanities and not only to science or technology.

What Does "Data" Mean?

The word data comes from the Latin datum, meaning "something given." In its earliest use, data were not numbers or code but givens: facts, observations, and records that could be trusted as the basis for reasoning.

Humanists—people engaged in the study of humanities subject areas—have been working with data for millennia:

A clay tablet listing grain shipments in ancient Uruk.
A medieval parish register recording births and deaths.
A 17th-century astronomer's notebook of measurements.

Each was data long before computers: they were evidence about the world that someone chose to record and preserve.

Data vs Information vs Interpretation

It helps to think of these concepts as layers of meaning:

Level	Description	Humanities Example
Data	Raw observations or records about the world.	The words of a poem; the dates on letters.
Information	Data that has been organized or described.	A spreadsheet listing each letter with sender, recipient, and year.
Interpretation	Information that has been analyzed to produce understanding or argument.	An essay about how letter- writing shaped 18th-century social life.

A historian, archaeologist, or musicologist often moves fluidly through all three layers without realizing it.

The Shifting Meanings of Data

Pre-modern world: Data as trustworthy facts about God's creation (things given to human reason).
Scientific Revolution: Data as measurements and observations supporting experiments and evaluating hypotheses.
Industrial Age: Data as records to be counted, standardized, and stored (birth registers, ledgers, maps).
Digital Era: Data as anything that can be encoded and processed: numbers, texts, images, sounds, emotions, clicks.

At each stage, data both reflect and shape what a society cares to know. The way we collect and store data is a reflection of our values.

Why the Humanities Need Data

For centuries, humanists have relied on data to document and interpret culture:

Archaeologists record artifact types, coordinates, and other observations.
Linguists catalog word forms and languages.
Archivists assign metadata to photographs and letters.
Digital humanists analyze word frequencies, emotions, and themes in texts or songs.

The difference is not that the humanities now have data: it's that we can now see our data as part of a larger ecosystem of meaning.

Even Jesse Welles' lyrics become data when we transcribe and analyze them, but they remain works of art and emotion. This dual status is central to humanistic data thinking.

Key Takeaways

Data = "things given." It is not inherently digital or numerical.
Data becomes information and then interpretation through human work.
The meaning of data changes with technology and culture.
Humanists bring critical and ethical awareness to data that purely technical fields often miss.

What is Data? (Data Intro Course)