I hope this will lead to a more common and standardized documentation of this kind of context wherever data are presented. Social media has in some ways opened a door to more data accountability in recent years, since people can and have been publicly asking these questions of those who are collecting or presenting data. It’s important to also explore the roots of those limitations and scrutinize the reasons certain data are not available or are not robust enough – why are certain data not collected, not reported, or inconsistent across data sources? Who was involved in collecting data, and who was not? How might data collection and reporting itself be perpetuating inequities? And - very importantly in a time of so much widespread misinformation - how do we explore these issues without discounting the useful and credible information we do have?” More from Rabah: It has never been enough to just identify data limitations. “There was a global scramble last year more than ever before (in my lifetime, at least) to collect and analyze real-time data, and that process necessarily required transparency, since people immediately saw the need to compare different reporting and projections of COVID-19 cases and deaths.” According to Rabah, there is always interest in finding new sources of data, “but last year highlighted how important it is to consider the limitations of the data we already have. “We need to dive deeper into data limitations,” according to Rabah Kamal. The learnings were both practical and provocative from the necessity for trust, to the power of multi-disciplinary collaboration, to addressing the limitations of data that lead to misinformation and inequality. Understanding context and the limitations of data is part two of a three-part series: Data in the time of COVID-19: What have we learned? Campion, members of the Tableau Advisory Board, what they felt were the biggest data lessons they’ve learned since the beginning of the pandemic. Recently we asked Amanda Makulec, Rabah Kamal, Francis X. “The successes of responding to the pandemic as one data community illustrate the necessity and strength of this kind of collaboration.” - Rabah Kamal Reference Materials Toggle sub-navigation.Teams and Organizations Toggle sub-navigation.
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