Humanities and the arts deal with an ambiguous and abstract reality (ideas and concepts and imaginative creations), whereas in at least the conventional understanding, science and mathematics and statistics deal with concrete, tangible data, numbers and so on.
But with the rise of big data, data has become - obviously - 'big'.
Statistics used to deal with the almost abstract concept of a population from a tangible reality of a sample. But now in data science even the samples can be enormous. The data scientist and statistician of today deal with data with programming languages - which is to say that they do not actually see the actual entire set of data, which would not be able to be perceived and processed by human cognition in a single glance. Thus single-glance-cognition or bird's-eye-view-processing would not suffice. You can look at a 5x5 table of persons suffering from a given disease and make some sense of it, or get a general idea from it, but not with big data. Thus data science as a science is dealing with a progressively abstract reality of big data. In this act of knowing and processing knowledge 'scientifically', the senses and the cognitive processes of the data scientist deal directly with the programming commands or prompts, but in an indirect way, it deals with a set of numbers, data, and information (almost infinite in nature from the persepective of the human mind), allowing AI tools and programming tools to act as a sort of extension in the cognitive act of the data scientist.
Long story short, the average Joe would comprehend and empathise with statements such as "There's a person in the park who's starving" or "I saw a person today with tuberculosis" than if given a huge spreadsheet detailing every single detail of every single starving person in the planet, or if he was asked to go through a list of all the people in a given country with tuberculosis. The human mind processes and the human heart empathises with imaginable sets of numbers more than thousands or millions or billions, which may seem huge to some and infinite to others.
The human mind cannot process infinite numbers as we are only human and do not have the absolute epistemological capabilities of God, who knows everything and everything at once. On the other hand, we know one component of knowledge first, and then another component of knowledge, which we may or may not predicate in relation to the previous knowledge (See 'Mystical City of God' by Blessed Mary of Agreda, a book about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Chapter 2 if I remember correctly). Our epistemological processes are subjective and imperfect.
We can imagine and therefore understand a few numbers but not infinite numbers, which brings us to the significance of data storytelling, for in every number hides a story. Numbers have to be viewed as letters and words and sentences at times and not just mathematical quantities which are analysed and dissected and therefore adequately 'known'. Such is the cognitive inability to objectively perceive big data in an age of advanced and emerging technologies.
This short article may or may not have been inspired by the book "Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data".
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