Warm Data

Work in progress.

Having recently trained with Nora Bateson as a Warm Data Lab / PNP host - my approach to how I make sense of the world is continuously being informed and shaped by the evolution of this thinking.

“You cannot take the grapes out of the wine.”

“To understand the butterfly you don’t pin it to a board.”

Warm Data is information about the interrelationships that connect elements of a complex system. Put another way, Warm Data is transcontextual information. Warm Data captures the qualitative dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is learned through quantitative data, (cold data). The implications for the uses of Warm Data are staggering, and may offer a whole new dimension to the tools of information science we have to work with at present.

“Information that does not take into account the full scope of inter-relationality in a system is likely to inspire misguided decision-making, which compounds already “wicked” problems. Warm Data is not meant to replace or in any way diminish other data, but rather it is meant to keep data of certain sorts “warm” — with a nest of relations intact.”

— Nora Bateson