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Chapter 1 Foundations

What data is, and how to look at it

Before any method comes a prior question: what is the thing being analysed, and how did it come to exist? Every number in this book was produced by somebody deciding to measure something, and that decision — what to count, whom to ask, what to leave out — is already an interpretation.

This chapter sets up the two habits the rest of the book depends on. The first is asking where a measurement came from and what it quietly excludes. The second is looking at it, because a figure that has been thought about carefully will tell you in seconds what a table hides for hours.