What does "data analysis" mean?

Question

i need it for my geography coursework

Answer 1

The data are your information, analysis is evaluation and interpretation, so data analysis is the evaluation and interpretation of information.  

Answer 2

The content of the human mind can be classified into five categories: 1. Data: symbols;    2. Information: data that are processed to be useful; provides answers to "who", "what", "where", and "when" questions;  3. Knowledge: application of data and information; answers "how" questions;    4. Understanding: appreciation of "why";    5. Wisdom: evaluated understanding.

Data is the most basic unit of knowledge and usually refers to a collection of organized information drawn from experience, observation or experiment. This may consist of numbers, text or images, particularly as measurements or observations of a set of variables.

Data analysis is the process of looking at and summarizing data with the intent to extract useful information and develop conclusions. In statistical applications, some people divide data analysis into descriptive statistics, which are used to describe the basic features of the data; exploratory data analysis, which focuses on discovering new features in the data and; confirmatory data analysis, which confirms or falsify existing hypotheses.

In geography spatial data analysis or spatial statistics is an useful tool, that includes any of the formal techniques which study entities using their topological (properties that describe how a space is assembled), geometric (size, shape, and relative position of figures and with properties of space), or geographic (position or point in physical space) properties. Modern spatial analysis focuses on computer based techniques because of the large amount of data, the power of modern statistical and geographic information science (GIS) software, and the complexity of the computational modeling. Geo-spatial data capture systems include remotely sensed imagery, environmental monitoring systems such as intelligent transportation systems, and location-aware technologies: mobile devices that can report location in near-real time. GIS provide platforms for managing these data, computing spatial relationships such as distance, connectivity and directional relationships between spatial units, and visualizing both the raw data and spatial analytic results within a cartographic context.

The information so attained, when is used for useful decision making becomes knowledge. When new knowledge synthesized new previously held knowledge, understanding is borne. Wisdom is the essence of philosophical probing. Unlike the previous four levels, it asks questions to which there is no (easily-achievable) answer, and in some cases, to which there can be no humanly-known answer period. Wisdom is therefore, the process by which we also discern, or judge, between right and wrong, good and bad.

"Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" -- The Rock, Eliot, 1934