[Esip-preserve] Fwd: definition of 'data'.

[Joe Hourcle]

On Jan 8, 2015, at 10:30 AM, Bruce Barkstrom via Esip-preserve wrote:

> Not much help at providing guidance.  So Data = Blob from which we can
> deduce that

[trimmed]

I'm saying that I'm not going to make a judgement call about what is or isn't data.

Everything could be data to someone else, so I'm not going to say that just because what you consider data isn't valid evidence in my field, I'm not going to say 'oh, that's not data, so I don't care about your opinion'.


Just assume that *everything* could potentially be data.

As an example, I was in a talk where someone from the Library of Congress mentioned that they had digitized their card catalog, so destroyed the old cards.

... and then someone pointed out that they just destroyed 200 years of handwriting, ink & paper samples.

-Joe