Today I read an article titled “On the Difference or Equality of Information, Misinformation, and Disinformation: A Critical Research Perspective” by Bernd Carsten Stahl. There are plenty of deep thinkers out there (too many to name) who contemplate what information is, or what knowledge is, or what data is, essentially going in circles around each other. However Stahl paraphrases another author in a way that I found worth calling out in particular because I have a background dealing with data and website user experience and it gave me pause.
Stahl paraphrases R. T. De George and says “De George (2003) distinguishes between data and information precisely because data contains no claim to truth whereas information does.” I’m not refuting this, but it made me think about my own bias in terms of those 2 terms. Taking that claim at face value, if data makes no claims to truth, that is precisely why I’d trust it more than information*. Let’s look at this example. Imagine I was looking for a house. If I saw a webpage that said “here is information about 123 Smith Street” I’d take that less seriously and expect different things compared to a webpage that says “here is data about 123 Smith Street”. To me, information is an interpretation of data.
To me, the word “data” is more specific than “information”, and information might exclude data. I’d expect the property data on a website to have many facts about the property, its sale history, the square meters of land that it’s on, etc. The property information on a website would summarise this into the bits that someone would think I’m most interested in, which might be all the data or only some. This is my own bias, having dealt with user experience on websites and all manner of user studies to determine what the popular vernacular is for people searching online, but it makes sense to me. I am not a philosopher on the matter, but it was interesting to contemplate what springs to mind when people use either term.
Disclaimer: Of course it matters where the data is coming from. One shouldn’t just trust anything that’s being called data, to state the obvious.
Sources:
On the Difference or Equality of Information, Misinformation, and Disinformation: A Critical Research Perspective by B.C. Stahl
The ethics of information technology and business. by R.T. De George