Our latest book, Read, Write, Think Data, is now available for purchase in both paperback and ebook formats! You can get your copy of the paperback by ordering it on Amazon, and you can get access to the ebook on Amazon or right here on our online store.

Read, Write, Think Data is the 3rd book in the Data Literacy Series, preceded by Data Literacy Fundamentals and Learning to See Data. We plan to publish another book in this series, along with other ancillary books in the coming years. The “body of knowledge” in the data space is so incredibly vast, we don’t anticipate running out of topics to write about and teach any time soon.

This book is a stand-alone companion to our recently launched Data Literacy Level 2 course. The title of our Level 2 course is “Working Effectively with Data.” In the course as well as this book we’ve published, we walk learners and readers through a four phase process that we call the WISDOM Data-Working Flow^TM.

We created this flow because we wanted to give people a framework to use to analyze their data no matter what tools they have at their disposal. Here is a detailed flowchart of that process, the shapes of which form the outline for the book and course:

A source of inspiration for this book was Hollywood film star Hedy Lamarr (yes, Hedy, not Hedly). Lamarr was once dubbed “the world’s most beautiful woman,” but she found the opportunity to prove that her worth was far, far more than skin deep. As it turns out, she was a genius.

During World War II, she collaborated with others to invent a new communication system designed to guide Allied torpedoes successfully to their targets while minimizing the likelihood of being intercepted or diverted.

Lemarr and her collaborators obtained U.S. Patent #2,292,387 for their invention. The essence of their idea, which became known as “frequency hopping,” has become the basis for many of the communication platforms we use today, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

This quote of hers served as a primary source of inspiration in the writing of this book as well as in the creation of our Level 2 course:

Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet.

Like Hedy, you too can build confidence and step out of the role of the puppet when it comes to data. Instead of depending on others to tell you what the data says, you can learn to analyze it for yourself. You can train your mind to think critically about how data can help you in any situation, and then you can develop the skill to actually put that valuable resource to good use.

Ultimately, our hope is that many more people will become confident data analysts, regardless of their actual job title, and regardless of their background. Every organization, every team, and every community need people who are willing and able to roll up their sleeves and work with data to extract the valuable insights hidden with it.

That’s the ultimate goal of this book and its associated course: to help you turn your data into the wisdom you’ll need to make better decisions.