Consensus has it that we are living in the Age of Big Data. When our college president was hired, he declared himself “data driven”; during interviews for vice president of academic affairs, all three finalists announced that they, too, were “data driven” (though none could articulate a clear image of what higher education might look like ten years from now). So what does “data driven” mean? Every day, our digital helpmeets dump petabytes of data into our cringing neural pathways. We are besotted with data; we’ve never had so much of the stuff. But to be data driven sounds uncomfortably like Captain Ahab (who was whale driven).
The words “data driven” are gang members; when I hear them, I can be sure the words “outcomes” and “a culture of evidence” are slouching around nearby and will shortly make an appearance. Often, data is announced (as if newly arrived from Mount Sinai) in totals, aggregates, medians, percentages, rates, multipliers–but then the data just piles up in corners and collects under the bed.
Frankly, I don’t have much confidence in data’s probative value. Even though digits and stats supply a comforting sense of measurement, certitude, and solidity, data alone is still the smallest particle of information, no matter how much of it accumulates. Data by itself is inert, like Frankenstein’s monster, patched together and waiting for a lightning bolt. Sometimes it waits a long time. It may seem irrefutable, but until data is analyzed, it just lays there. Remembering Christmas presents from his childhood in Wales, Dylan Thomas recalled receiving “books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”