>We tend to think of data as the raw material of evidence. Just as many substances, like sugar or oil, are transformed from a raw state to a processed state, da

>We tend to think of data as the raw material of evidence. Just as many substances, like sugar or oil, are transformed from a raw state to a processed state, data is subjected to a series of transformations before it can be put to use. The best raw data is "raw" as in food, but often it is "raw" as in sewage. I was recently working with some open public data, and it was very much the latter. For example, there were a few important columns that were filled as free-form text by police officers, and contained all sorts of random entries that made the column basically useless. Sometimes they were unclear abbreviations or jargon, and sometimes they were what appeared to be keyboard-mashing, and possibly some bad OCR. It is obvious that the data collection was only designed for events to be reviewed individually, if at all, whereas in the tech world we know to always design our data to be analysed collectively. I prefer to work with data that is "raw" as in food. On a personal project, I added a processing stage before my "raw" stage. I decided to call it the "alive" stage.