Meeting Your Data

HES 505 Fall 2025: Session 4

Matt Williamson

Today’s Plan

  • Data, information, and knowledge

  • The elements of data quality

  • Concerns with the growth in available data

  • Towards data justice

Revisiting Workflows

Get Data???

Boisot and Canals, 2004

Observations become data through the filters we put on them

  • Our questions guide which observations we consider data

  • But what about found data?

Most spatial data is “found” data

  • Military advancement

  • Enumeration of populations

  • Delineations of authority

Data Justice

Questions to ask yourself?

… but you have data!!

Documenting your data

Exploring your data

Doing both with Quarto