Data Collection is Hard. You Should Try It.

For people who make careers out of data, data scientists don’t have nearly enough experience in data collection — and many data scientists don’t seem to feel much cognitive dissonance from this fact, despite (very persuasive!) overtures by a few valiant data professionals¹.

With this blog post I want to give a defense of data collection — not as an activity that’s inherently worthwhile pursuing (I assume data professionals don’t need to be convinced of that!), but as something that is worth doing even for selfish reasons. Why should you spend time learning about that data collection system that’s being maintained by that other team at work? Why should you consider collecting some data for your next side project? What’s in it for you?

Throughout this blog post, I’ll be making comparisons to a recent project of mine, cryptics.georgeho.org, a dataset of cryptic crossword clues which I created and published last year.

Learn Data-Adjacent Technologies

The most obvious reason is that collecting data is a unique opportunity to learn many staple technologies in data — and there aren’t many projects that run the entire data tech stack.

To enumerate these technologies:

1. Compute services
   • Your data collection pipelines will need to run somewhere. Will that be in the cloud, or on your local computer? How do you think about trading off cost, compute and convenience?
   • I ran most of my web scraping on DigitalOcean Droplets, but I could just as easily have taken the opportunity to learn more about cloud compute solutions or serverless functions like AWS EC2 or Lambda. These days, the project runs incremental scrapes entirely on my laptop.
2. Data storage
   • You’ll need to store your data somewhere, whether it be a relational or NoSQL database, or just flat files. Since your data will outlive any code you write, careful design of the data storage solution and schema will pay dividends in the long run.
   • I used SQLite for its simplicity and performance. However, as the scope of the project expanded, I had to redesign the schema multiple times, which was painful.
3. Labeling, annotation or other data transformations
   • After collecting your data, you may want to label, annotate, structure or otherwise transform your data. For example, perhaps you’ll want to pull structured tabular data out of unstructured PDFs or HTML tag soups; another example might be to have humans label the data.
   • This is the main “value-add” of your dataset — while the time and effort required to collect and store the data constitutes a moat, ultimately what will distinguish your dataset to users will be the transformations done here.
   • For me, this involved a lot of BeautifulSoup to parse structured data out of HTML pages. This required a significant amount of development and engineering effort.
4. Data licensing and copyright
   • Once you have your dataset, can you license, share or even sell your data? The legality of data are a huge grey area (especially if there’s web scraping involved), and while navigating these waters will be tricky, it’s instructive to learn about it.
   • I feel like the collection and structuring of cryptic crossword clues for academic/archival purposes was fair use, and so didn’t worry too much about the legality of my project — but it was an educational rabbit hole to fall down!
5. Sharing and publishing data
   • The legal nuances of data aside, the technical problem of sharing data is pretty tricky!
   • This problem sits at the intersection of MLOps and information design: you want to share the data in a standardized way, while having an interface that making it easy for users to explore your data. Serving a tarball on a web server technically works, but leaves so much on the table.
   • cryptics.georgeho.org uses Datasette, which I can’t recommend highly enough.
6. Writing documentation
   • If you think it’s hard to write and maintain good documentation for software, imagine how difficult it must be to do the same for data, which outlives software and is much harder to both create and version control.
   • I’ve found Gebru et al.’s Datasheets for Datasets to be an excellent template for documenting data.

Design a Data Collection System

Hopefully by now you can appreciate that every part of the data collection pipeline involves not just technical proficiency with some system or framework, but also an element sound architecture.

Collecting data is a great way to get experience designing an entire data pipeline from end to end, from creation to delivery. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come easily (even in industry!), and while your data pipeline won’t be as sophisticated as the kinds you’ll find at data companies, you’ll still be able to take away some valuable lessons from it.

For cryptics.georgeho.org, I found that the most valuable pattern for storing data was to dump raw and unstructured data into a database (a “data lake”), and then extract useful and structured data into a separate database (a “data warehouse”). I also learnt that the historical backfilling ETL job required a lot of time and compute, but subsequent incremental ETL jobs could just run off of my laptop. These best practice patterns around data collection and management are all applicable far beyond my simple side project, and were valuable lessons to learn first-hand.