"Avoiding dead-ends" - Section 4 of 7: THE DATA LITERACY DRIVING SCHOOL (free excerpts)
This is the fourth part of the chapter titled “The Data Literacy Driving School”, from the book “The Data Garden And Other Data Allegories”.
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Avoiding dead-ends
As time goes by, you find yourself increasingly confident in your driving. The data car seems to move more smoothly as you manipulate the controls with increasing aptitude. You find yourself able to concentrate better, without your attention flitting between all the various things you need to remember, and you’re using the dials as though you’ve always known how to use them.
It’s still taking quite a bit of effort to remember everything you need to do and there’s the odd time that you crunch the gears or swerve a bit too close to the curb, but the instructor is able to sit back and say less and less as you show you know what you’re doing.
How on earth did I get by before? you think, as you drive along, remembering how clueless and helpless you’d been when you were just a passenger in a taxi, totally dependent on your driver to take you wherever you needed to go. You remember how many people you’ve known, who have been taken to completely the wrong destination, simply because they had no idea what they were signing up for.
It’s at this point that the driving instructor starts to talk again; but this time, not just about where you’re going, but also pointing out other data archive alleys and data insight dead-ends to avoid. When he starts pointing them out, you suddenly become aware of just how many there are and how easy it would be to go down some of them. To the untrained eye, they could look just like some of the other roads you’ve been driving down, but some lead to the wrong destination. There’s one analytical short-cut that your instructor points out, where it takes half the time and leads to somewhere that looks like the right place, but many a data person has lost their life when they actually tried to get out there. Then there are the routes that take many times longer to get to the same place. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could easily go down them and might not even know you’ve taken a wrong turn until it’s too late and you’re committed to a lengthy detour.
“You can learn a lot from other data drivers”, the instructor says, “and as long as you’re learning from someone who’s experienced and done the journey a few times before, that’s a good thing to do, because it’ll save you a lot of time.” As he’s talking, he points to a road that he wants you to turn down and you follow his direction. “However, the only way to become really good at data navigation is by doing it yourself. That could be navigating for someone else who’s driving, or planning a route that you drive yourself, but you need to understand the roads and how to plot a course, which means you can’t learn by just getting other people to do it without taking any interest in the journey.”
You nod in agreement. It hasn’t taken long to realise how important what you’re learning is. By having to drive the data car yourself, you can now see why knowledge on its own isn’t enough: real experience is crucial for being able to safely get to your destination.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this excerpt.
If you are interested in reading more, please do check the book out on Amazon:
Thanks for reading!
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