A cathartic website exploring emerging legal definitions of data and why implementing them is so difficult.
What Is Data? explores how laws, regulations, and policies define "data."
The project began with a simple question: what counts as data? As I collected definitions from different legal and policy sources, I found that the answers were surprisingly inconsistent. Definitions varied widely across contexts, making it difficult to determine where the boundaries of data actually begin and end.
When I first built the site, I imagined continuing to update it as new definitions emerged. At the time, that felt manageable. Today, the growing volume of definitions only reinforces the original observation: even as data governance expands, there is still no stable or universally accepted definition of what "data" is.
Built using code by Jason Heppler and adapted for this project, What Is Data? collects and displays definitions side by side, turning a practical implementation challenge into an experiment in classification, language, and governance.