In New Orleans in 2003, at what was the last Public Radio Conference, ever, I did a presentation on Digital Radio, in the very early times of HD Radio.
Before my session, my colleague David Liroff (formerly of WGBH and CPB) did a session on what PBS and U.S. Public TV had learned through the challenging upgrade to HDTV in the years prior. David shared a lot of great things in his session, but prefaced it with an aphorism he had borrowed from someone else:
THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTE IS NOT DATA
- Such and easy and true statement. One story does not make for the evidence to prove something, and a collection of stories may not be an accurate picture of reality. The use of real or apocryphal anecdotes in politics notwithstanding.
As aphorisms go, it is a good one.
David Liroff never claimed credit for it, but he was the first to share it with me. In looking into the history of the statement, I recently found origins going back to the 1960’s
Oddly enough, the “source” of the quote may not have said what several of us have adopted.
In a blog post by David Smith, the credit goes to Raymond Wolfinger (presumed to be the political scientist from Stanford and then UC-Berkeley) as the first to coin the phrase – but with a difference: - Revolutions: The plural of anecdote is data, after all
I've used the quotation "The plural of anecdote is not data" in various talks over the years, never knowing the original source. - Professor Wolfinger claims to have said “the plural of anecdote is data.”
And I guess that is true, too. Data is data. Whether it is data that allows you to make appropriate measurements or judgments is a different issue.
This takes me to a different thought about most people. Well, not actually most people, but of the phrase, “most people.”
That will be for another day.
