Indeed, data in the 21st century is largely ephemeral, because it is so easily produced: a machine creates it, uses it for a few seconds and overwrites it as new data arrives. Some data is never examined at all, such as scientific experiments that collect so much raw data that scientists never look at most of it. Only a fraction ever gets stored on a medium such as a hard drive, tape or sheet of paper. Yet even ephemeral data often has ‘descendants’— new data based on the old. Think of data as oil and information as gasoline: a tanker of crude oil is not useful until it arrives, its … Continue reading Roger E. Bohn, James E. Short *