Solid book that goes deep into the implications of the increasing datafication of our societies, touching on many different set interconnected issues. Suffers a bit from explicit North American perspective and the sometimes too close alignment with the personal history of the author. ( )

Living in Data is, by far, an outstanding book! It gave me much more insight into what people and businesses do with our data. It is easy to read and hard to put down. Highly recommend! ( )

There is no point bringing any preconceived notions to Jer Thorp’s Living in Data. You will be wrong, but rewardingly so. The book is a kind of autobiography, but one focused on data gathering and manipulation. Thorp is a gifted data scientist, though he’ll tell you it’s all just trial and error. He didn’t set out to do this kind of work. He’s not a quant; he has no doctorates. But he is also far more human; there’s a huge dollop of passion that makes all the difference in the world in his personality, in his world, and in his book. He’s exhausting to keep up with.

You might not think of data design as risky or in any way exciting. A lot of sitting around, developing eyestrain. But Thorp gets invited to plunge the depths of the ocean in a deep-diving sub, count elephants in Africa from the air as well as on the ground, and was nearly rammed by a raging hippo in a flimsy boat on the Okavango. He also got to design the 9/11 memorial display by effectively fitting the 2800 names of the victims the way their loved ones asked for them to be remembered, and went on to design data displays for the New York Times, including the tracking of social media posts of its stories. He created his own school to show others the way to use all their creative juices in the pursuit of displaying data. Among other things, data can be art. This is a whole ‘nother universe from the discussions of data we are accustomed to.

If that weren’t enough, he is a passionate liberal Canadian who appreciates the environmental issues, the human issues, and the social issues. It is all on display in the ever-mutating Living in Data, his first book.

Not knowing what to expect, I was locked in by the first few pages, which jumped from mood-setting story to story like an avant garde film. Thorp draws you in with ever-changing scenery, then abandons it all for another scene somewhere else in the world. He also likes to break the fourth wall, by suddenly addressing the reader directly:
“I promise that you’ll only read the phrase ‘big data’ once in this chapter, and it’s already over.”

Despite the fact big data is a term and not a phrase, this is a delightful departure from the expected. It appears in a paragraph describing why data became a collective noun – now known as mass nouns for some reason. Both singular and plural are in common use for data, whether that’s right or wrong. So on top of everything else, there is semantics. Also Greek and Latin origin stories, and the occasional dalliance into fiction, particularly Star Trek. The book does not lack for variety.

The thing about data is it can be anything. If someone records the number of steps an ant takes per minute, that is potential data stored somewhere for someone to employ. Thorp is hyper-conscious of data. He sees it in everything, from its problem-solving aspects to its problematic issues. He truly lives in data, so an invitation to see his world is revealing.

He deals with the foundations early and gets past them quickly. Data, he says, is a human artifact, a system and a process. Not a thing, not an algorithm, not a spreadsheet. It is what people do with it that makes it data.

To delve deeper, Thorp examines the way our brains work and how data design takes place:
“There’s an important difference between the way neural networks work and the way a standard computer program does. With a run-of-the-mill program like a decision tree, we push a set of data and a list of rules into our code-based machine, and out comes an answer. With neural networks, we push in a set of data and answers, and out comes a rule.”

Data is all about rules. Thorp can take any data dump, write some code to apply rules to it and wait to see what comes back. Then he’ll change the rules, again and again, until he gets what he expected or wanted, or that could take him in a new and value-added direction.

So it’s the human brain that makes the data valuable. Computers just crunch records the brain could never handle. To prove it, Thorp delves into how we appreciate numbers, like money, or miles, or population. Beyond small numbers, we simply cannot visualize them, let alone extract a variety of salient facts from them in our heads. Computers do the bidding of the brain; both are needed to make data useful and presentable.

He has two rules for data, which address the angst we continually read about over privacy and ownership: No data collection without representation, and when in doubt, don’t collect data. Very sensible, and totally ignored, as he well knows.

He discusses the issue of open data, of which there is far too little, and what is there is generally inadequate when not invisible. Everyone seems to qualify open data, so that it has numerous restrictions on it. This varies from source to source and jurisdiction, making a mockery of the concept of openness. He gives the example of the elephant survey in Africa, which had to obtain permission from a handful of countries they roam across. The countries all put different restrictions on the data, according to their local politics and sensitivities, making it difficult to be made accessible. Sometimes the reason is a really good one, like preventing poachers from learning where a family of rhinos was discovered. So unfortunately, open can be simply a goal, or an ideal.

In some ways, because the book is so many things, it is all too much. Thorp loves describing scenes in glorious detail, from the biting ants to the skin-cutting plants, the air, the water, and the sounds. This makes him much more than a data scientist. But if you’re reading to find ideas on data management and design, it can be annoying, and frankly, skippable. There are relatively few conclusions one can draw from reading it. It is far more of an adventure than expected, but also less impactful than desired. But it’s a wonderful life.

He does a lot of work with indigenous groups, in the USA and in New Zealand, recapturing and digitizing old recordings and designing systems to access and display them, and make them accessible and useful. Often for the first time ever. The biggest sticking point seems to be copyright; indigenous groups want to know who is accessing and employing data about them, and especially, who is profiting from it. He is a big supporter of those being taken advantage of, and a so a lot of his work is the feel good kind. The last paragraph in the book begins:
“Every word on every page of this book rests on top of the work done by decades of researchers and scholars and artists and activists—largely women of color—who saw the mess we were making with data, and to whom we mostly didn’t listen.” Which I think describes Thorp’s life, persona and attitudes quite neatly.

David Wineberg ( )