Data with a Soul and a Few More Lessons I Have Learned About Data by Enrico Bertini.
From the post:
I don’t know if this is true for you but I certainly used to take data for granted. Data are data, who cares where they come from. Who cares how they are generated. Who cares what they really mean. I’ll take these bits of digital information and transform them into something else (a visualization) using my black magic and show it to the world.
I no longer see it this way. Not after attending a whole three days event called the Aid Data Convening; a conference organized by the Aid Data Consortium (ARC) to talk exclusively about data. Not just data in general but a single data set: the Aid Data, a curated database of more than a million records collecting information about foreign aid.
The database keeps track of financial disbursements made from donor countries (and international organizations) to recipient countries for development purposes: health and education, disasters and financial crises, climate change, etc. It spans a time range between 1945 up to these days and includes hundreds of countries and international organizations.
Aid Data users are political scientists, economists, social scientists of many sorts, all devoted to a single purpose: understand aid. Is aid effective? Is aid allocated efficiently? Does aid go where it is more needed? Is aid influenced by politics (the answer is of course yes)? Does aid have undesired consequences? Etc.
Isn’t that incredibly fascinating? Here is what I have learned during these few days I have spent talking with these nice people.
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This fits quite well with the resources I mention in Lap Dancing with Big Data.
Making the Aid data your own data, will require time, effort and personal effort to understand and master it.
By that point, however, you may care about the data and the people it represents. Just be forewarned.