After reading “What is Data,” I realized that I had never thought about data before, especially in terms of writing. As someone who is not exactly tech-savvy, I definitely never thought about how data impacts my education in English and my potential career in digital writing.
I have been thinking about the question that was posed in the reading for this week: “Is typing on a computer writing?” If you really think about it, it is not really writing. It is definitely communication but perhaps not writing. We may see words and sentences when we look at a computer, but to the computer, all it recognizes are 1’s and 0’s. This is somewhat mind-boggling to me.
Obviously, data is crucial for writing to exist in the digital space. Have you ever thought about what other things data might be useful for? What about making a peanut butter and banana sandwich? Luckily, I found a gem of an article, or at least it is for those of us who love a good peanut butter and banana sandwich, that uses data to produce the perfect sandwich. Ethan Rosenthal, a data scientist in NYC, made a “pip installable python package nannernest” to optimize sandwiches and yield the perfect banana, peanut butter, bread ratio. Genius, I know!
Rosenthal summarizes the process like so:
“It’s really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and “slice” the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread “box” into a 2D nesting algorithm.” - Rosenthal
Simple isn’t the word I would use, but it is impressive, nonetheless. With the level of complexity of the programs and software that Rosenthal used to complete this task, I believe it is safe to suggest that a combination of list and dictionary compound data were used. It is fascinating to me how data builds onto itself to create systems that allow humans to solve their problems. Problems as simple as online shopping, so we don’t have to leave our houses, to more complex issues like trying to find the ideal ratio of one’s sandwich contents!