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> The trick, he discovered, was to turn a song into a piece of data.

I cringe and then laugh inside whenever I see tech writing like this.

I didn't see a problem with it. The magazine is "The Atlantic" which has a general readership.

If one writes a program to analyze Shakespeare text, he might describe it as "converted the text into a multi-dimensional vector space" or "mapped ngrams into a point cloud" -- and that would be acceptable lexicon for a Dr Dobbs Programming Journal or possibly ArsTechnica. However, for The Atlantic, it seems reasonble for a journalist/editor to write that as "convert the plays into data."

Yes, Shakespeare the text itself was already "data" so in a pedantic analysis, saying "converting data to data" seems pointless but that's not the level of indirection the general readership is at.

Even for a general audience, "data" is uselessly broad. Such a reader would be better served by a better explanation of the acoustic fingerprint idea, or even nothing at all. As it is, the article promotes the idea that "data" is some sort of magical thing, and that's harmful.

I never said there was a problem with it based on the readership. I just think it's funny. ;-)

I had to laugh at this too. What exactly was it before it became data? Magic? A choir of tiny gnomes?

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