Selling Data Science: Common Language by Sean Gonzalez.
From the post:
What do you think of when you say the word “data”? For data scientists this means SO MANY different things from unstructured data like natural language and web crawling to perfectly square excel spreadsheets. What do non-data scientists think of? Many times we might come up with a slick line for describing what we do with data, such as, “I help find meaning in data” but that doesn’t help sell data science. Language is everything, and if people don’t use a word on a regular basis it will not have any meaning for them. Many people aren’t sure whether they even have data let alone if there’s some deeper meaning, some insight, they would like to find. As with any language barrier the goal is to find common ground and build from there.
You can’t blame people, the word “data” is about as abstract as you can get, perhaps because it can refer to so many different things. When discussing data casually, rather than mansplain what you believe data is or what it could be, it’s much easier to find examples of data that they are familiar with and preferably are integral to their work. (emphasis added)
Well? Your answer here:______.
Let’s recast that last clause to read:
…it’s much easier to find examples of subjects they are familiar with and preferably are integral to their work.
So that the conversation is about their subjects and what they want to say about them.
As a potential customer, I would find that more compelling.
You?
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the deep dive on my article, I really enjoy the feedback. Somewhat ironically, I used “data” as a meaningful word immediately after I pointed out how abstract and difficult to communicate it is! I do agree with your use of the word “subjects” instead, but that subject does need to be related to data, otherwise you’re not bridging the gap between the two subjects. How about:
“… it’s much easier to find examples of subjects involving data that they are familiar with, and preferably integral to their work.”
Hope you make it to one of our events if you’re ever in the DC area!
http://www.meetup.com/data-visualization-dc
http://www.meetup.com/data-science-dc
Comment by SeanMGonzalez — September 1, 2013 @ 4:17 pm