Main menu Data All The Way Down: Structured versus Unstructured Data A lot of people have strong opinions about what is and isn't data. You may have encountered them: they are often quite happy to expound upon the virtues of the data that they work with, before explaining to you that other things that people call data are not data, or at least, not "real" or "good" or "valid" data. If you want to see this in action, ask an engineer if ethnographic field notes are data. Or, ask an ethnographer if a spreadsheet of quantified happiness measures is data. (Even better, do this while the engineer and the ethnographer are in the same room together. Don't forget to place bets on the outcome.) As is often the case in situations where people have strong opinions, everyone is both a little right, and a little wrong. You see, friends, there is no distinction between data and not data. It's all data, all the way down. Ethnographic field notes? Data. The instantaneous velocity of a swallow laden with a coconut? Data. The tax returns of every American for the last five years? That's data too. Voicemail your grandma left you last Wednesday? Data. Picture of a cat with a caption? Also data. Search terms you use to find either of those things? Yep, you guessed it -- also data. It gets more meta than that, too: The image of the world that your retinas pick up? Data. The sensation your fingertips