About Data and Analytics

Data is

At its core data is simply information that's been recorded in some persistent medium. Humans have been creating data-recording information-since the dawn of human history.
Data can be as simple as an atomic value-a single bit, or infinitely complex.

Electronic/computer data is

information that's been recorded in media that's acessible to-and normally only to-sensors that read the physical media, converting the information into internal representations that can be manipulated by the computer.

Analytics is

At heart, analytics is the human activity of accessing, manipulating, and interpreting data. This can be as simple as reading the data, as has been done with cave paintings, crop yields, merchants' accounts, ships' logs, and other sources across the ages. It can be as complex as advanced statistical and mathematical manipluation of the source data to discover relationships among the data's elements; an example from classical science is Kepler's deduction of his laws of planetary motion from Brache's astronomical data.

Computer-assisted analytics

In practice, modern analytics is almost universally concerned with the use of computers to record and analyze data.