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Guide • Big Data / small data
Given that not everyone may be ready to go on a big data adventure, Jon Pratty outlines six practical ways to be smarter about understanding and working with the basics.
Everywhere you turn these days people are talking about big, real-time or open data. So while this world may feel a little far away for some us, here are five practical steps we can take right now to start on the road to counting what counts. Making your culture findable — police how people find you online! We were nearly there. An hour-and-ahalf in the car with really impatient teenagers, and we were almost at the gallery we’d scoped out for a weekend visit. But it wasn’t there. Google Maps said it was, but a note on the door said the gallery had moved two years ago. Whose fault was it? When we’d stopped shouting, we realised the Google Maps pin had been added by a member of the public, not someone from the gallery. Who knew? Just goes to show, you can prevent a lot of grief with potential visitors by keeping up-to-date all the places — social media, web, Google — where people find info about you or your event, or venue, or theatre, or show. Simple, effective and you just need to regularly timetable an online data check to make sure all is correct. Whatever you’re doing creatively, you are the single most important source of info about what you do. No-one else is tasked with getting your info right.
/ small data
Thinking about what data is — it’s much simpler than you think Of course, it’s possible to make talking and writing about data really complicated; just eavesdrop on the organisations who do that professionally, like the W3C, LODLAM or Schema.org and you’ll soon realise there’s another world of deeply puzzling terminologies out there to keep initiates happy. But at a simple level, for our non-expert purposes, data is information. In many culture places, that might be info about your venue, your work or the things you have collected in your museum. Where is it? When does it open? What’s the most popular object? Getting a bit deeper, it could be info about something that only you have or do — you might own the only collection of Victorian lawnmowers in the world, for example. And that’s where info — or data — becomes useful to us all, whether we’re the British Museum or the British Lawnmower Museum. You might be the smallest museum in the world, but if you have the only remaining 1830 Budding and Ferrabee push-along mower in the world, then you’ve got a uniquely important piece of information that is also uniquely searchable online. It’s the only one left, and it’s your job to tell people about that via web, search and social media. That’s a key philosophical point about the value of all individual points of data: someone, somewhere will be searching for that mower and your information about it is very valuable indeed. All info sources are important, big or small. Your valuable info mixes into a bigger pot of data that people search online. So get it right, and keep it up to date.