If you wrote a list of objectives for any organisation today, one would be to be truly data-driven. Not too long ago, only a few specialised technicians needed to understand how to read, understand and communicate data.
Today? Everybody needs those skills. Fortunately, 21st Century analytics software is incredibly powerful in how it supports the needs of so many businesses. The latest developments include technologies, such as natural language processing, that enable more people to ask more questions of data, whatever their background.
How did we get here? The journey to this point is much longer than you’d imagine.
Imagine a data scientist said to you, “collecting and cleaning data is laborious and tedious, but once I had the data, an infinite variety of views opened up.” While sounding like a familiar lament from any contemporary data conference, this quote is 250 years old. It was written by Joseph Priestley, the polymath who created some of the first visualisations of visualise historical data.
Priestley’s quote reminds us that we should not forget that we’ve been wrestling with data analytics and visualisation for a long time. The challenges the pioneers faced are the same ones we face today. Aspiring data-driven organisations can learn as much from the pioneers as any contemporary text book.
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