DataSharing

the-raw-data

It is critical that you include the rawest form of the data that you have access to. Here are some examples of the raw form of data:

• The strange binary file your measurement machine spits out
• The unformatted Excel file with 10 worksheets the company you contracted with sent you
• The complicated JSON data you got from scraping the Twitter API
• The hand-entered numbers you collected looking through a microscope

You know the raw data is in the right format if you:

1. Ran no software on the data
2. Did not manipulate any of the numbers in the data
3. You did not remove any data from the data set
4. You did not summarize the data in any way

If you did any manipulation of the data at all it is not the raw form of the data. Reporting manipulated data as raw data is a very common way to slow down the analysis process, since the analyst will often have to do a forensic study of your data to figure out why the raw data looks weird.