What is Digital Data [Unpublished]

What is Digital Data?

The goal of this blog is to provide public health experts with a pragmatic grasp of technical concepts so they can both understand their technical teams and provide effective guidance as public health increases its technical capabilities.

Most people associate digital data with the electronic devices we use every day. They believe digital data is a modern creation. But civilizations have been creating digital data, the transmission of information through various communication systems, for millennia. Here are some historical examples:

  • Julius Caesar made use of an early digital technology: The Latin alphabet. This allowed him to communicate his political messages consistently across a vast empire. Language writing systems are a good example of digital data. Discrete letters allow for consistent recording and transmission of otherwise ephemeral human speech.
  • Paul Revere needed to know if the British redcoats would come by land or by sea and watched for one or two lights to be signaled from the Old North Church. This shows the power of digitizing simple binary information. Seeing only one light allowed Paul Revere to carry a consistent and correct message.
  • The Titanic used a wireless radio technology to transmit its final distress signal. These signals were sent as a series of dots and dashes, essentially binary information, grouped together in patterns to represent letters of the alphabet. This allowed for accurate and instantaneous transmission of information across great distances.

Today we have electronic devices that excel at managing digital data. However, regardless of the advanced technology employed, these devices all rely on the same basic principles of digital data. Whether through a smartphone or a Latin scroll, digital data continues to store and transmit information as a discrete set of symbols. With digital data, information not only retains its original meaning regardless of its form or delivery method, but that information can go farther, faster.

In public health, digital data is often seen as something only technical people can understand. Public health professionals willing to learn some basic principles will discover great utility in digital data.

For example, computers see all data in the form of ones and zeros. This seems limiting, but you can do an awful lot with ones and zeros if you have enough of them. The story of Paul Revere shows the power of knowing whether the British would come by land (a one, for example) or by sea (perhaps a zero). It’s a simple but powerful concept.

We live in a world awash in digital data, and the more we recognize its basic concepts, the better we can leverage it in our work. The complexity and the importance of managing this digital data is only growing, and all public health professionals can and must learn to create and use this digital information to accomplish our goals.

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