Data, Evidence and Interpretation

Data is not Evidence. Data may become evidence when interpreted: this means that evidence is data that is contextualized, processed, visualized and integrated within a paradigm or a state of mind.

This means that, while data can be objective (although the objectivity of data is debated), evidence is not necessarily objective. When beliefs change, some evidence may regress to being data, and vice-versa. In some cases, the same data may be used to be evidence for more than one statement: this is what we mean when we say that data can be re-used.

It’s useful to talk about Data Interpretation to understand what we mean in the previous paragraph. Data is interpreted when it is considered together with context, accrued knowledge and preconceptions, thus creating new Knowledge.

But, what is knowledge? Defining “Knowledge” is complicated. Whole branches of philosophy deal with what knowledge is: The scientific field that dealw with this question is known as epistemology (greek “episteme”, knowledge, and “logos”, study of - the study of knowledge).

The philosophers, however, converge on some core facts:

• There is a reality that is true;
• We can describe reality trough propositions (i.e. phrases that contain a single assertion).

For instance, “Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party in Germany during world war two” is a preposition: it conveys just one assertion about the world.

By these principles, we could create Knowledge by accumulating these true propositions. But how can we know some proposition is true? Philosophers talk about “Justified Belief”, that is, a proposition is knowledge if any only if it is justified. Here we come back to our notions of data and Evidence. When a researcher needs to support a preposition - say, an hypothesis - they are converting data into evidence through interpretation.

This idea might seem banal, but it is central: the process of data sharing and re-using lies in this distinction. When the same data can be used to support two different prepositions, the process that changes is this conversion from data to evidence. The same data is recontextualized, repackaged, reframed, and therefore re-used for a new purpose.