I

Data is my friend.

When I was in ASU’s Digital Culture program and creating digital media products, I realized the importance of data and how it plays its own, indispensable role in the creation and implementation of digital media products.

If

• My ideas are the inspirations and structures that help me during my creative process, and
• Coding and using of technologies are the tools and methodologies that support me during my implementation process,

Then

• Data is the power behind the product that makes it do what we want to do, tell stories, and even make things alive.

Technically, datasets are consisted of a bunch of numbers and texts and look like “spreadsheets”. However, they are magic. For example, you can capture your motion and export it into CSV format. Guess what? Your motion can be applied to anywhere, like a 3D model of a Teddy Bear. Remember the movie, Ted? Unexpectedly, you broke the boundary between computer science, the arts, film, and media.

I always think that “if you have data, you can do anything.”

II

People these days are talking about “big data”. Besides digital arts and media, how data can be used and make impacts in other industries? For example, how data science plays its role in the study of linguistics, archaeology, etc.?

A group of people from Division of the Humanities in the University of Chicago has a broad and insightful vision on this. They started a brand-new program, Digital Studies, in Summer 2018. I’m now one of the only two master students in this program.

2018 is also a new beginning for me. Although I’ve been dealing with data all the time, I didn’t have any experience in Data Science. Learning some new programming language, like Python and R, is definitely not a hard challenge for me. However, what makes sense is, data science provides me a brand-new perspective to observe particular things.

Data is not just data. It tells stories. It could show a phenomenon, and explain why this is happening. It could narrate a part of history, without any subjective opinions and emotional interference. It could also be a key for us to predict the future.

It can be visualized in multiple, intuitive, and interactive ways. As a long-term designer and developer, I enjoy designing and creating the visualization of the data that will demonstrate a change of things and tell the story. Before I was doing these, I never thought that data science could be highly related to my study of design.

Stay tuned for more projects and blog posts that I will make about data science in 2019.