“Hi. We are planning to open a bunch of hairdresser salons in various locations in Germany. We’ve dug out some data and are about to evaluate some good locations at the moment. We were wondering whether you would want to help us.”
– “Sure. What’ve you got?”
“Well – here’s some data for you:
<<Amount of hairdresser salons in Germany: 73 500
Amount of hairdresser visits per head [sic!] and year, 2008: 5,75
Amount of money spent by males on average per hairdresser visit, in Euro: 15,32
Amount of money spent by females on average per hairdresser visit, in Euro: 42,75
Agreed hourly wage for a hairdresser in the federal state of Saxony, in Euro: 3,06
Agreed hourly wage for a hairdresser in the federal state of Hesse, in Euro: 7,99 >>”
– “Errm, OK. What next?”
“That’s how far we’ve gotten, really. Are you able to help us?”
– “I don’t know yet. Let me evaluate. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”
“Appreciated. Tomorrow then. Bye.”
What I have found after one hour of research – finally from the same data source:
<<Amount of hairdresser visits per head [sic!] and year, 1998: 15 >>
Data. I mean: fuck it, y’know?
[*All data in <</>> from: brandeins 12/2009, “Die Welt in Zahlen”, Hamburg. That magazine is much appreciated and shall be considered wholeheartedly recommended for well over a decade by now (NB. Its’s published in German, entirely). For that particular reason: this is an entirely unauthorized translation by the author of this blog post.
**All annotations in square brackets ([…]) are added by the author of this blog post.
***This post was assembled from my unused materials for the presentation about “Data and Context” at the “Web Analytics Wednesday” held at the “World Analytics Association” event in Sanomatalo, Helsinki, March 30, 2010]
And, yes: If we would be truly serious about adding all needed disclaimers to the data we deal with on a daily basis we would need to have a completely new nomenclature which can distinguish between at least three levels of depiction.
****All asterisks (*) in this post are just randomly added and don’t necessarily refer to any particular semantic or syntactic entities of this post in part or in total.