About

Header image from the River Aire, in Leeds.

Fragile Data is the collected thoughts of a practitioner in data - my background is in  analytics and decision making psychology, so I am particularly fascinated by the way we use data to understand our world, and use our world to understand data.

Working with data is very much an iceberg subject - so much said, yet somehow so much left unsaid, under the surface. Learning to surf on the ocean of data we humans are now generating has great potential to effect positive change on the world, but it seems little understood, and often neither the benefactors nor creators have much of an interest, or failing that, a clue, on how to communicate these ideas and benefits.

In short, we are drowning as we can see data, data, everywhere and yet it seems increasingly difficult to actually use it to make decisions (drinking it was never on the cards). So, what are we using to make decisions? As said above, we are using our world to understand the data - we are using stories. But these stories are often at odds with one another, endlessly disputed and discounted, hence the name of this blog - there is something between the data and our understanding of the truth it is meant to represent which is fragile.