With the current global emphasis on sharing research data with the public, you might wonder - what can the public actually do with data? How can they access it, understand it, or apply it? Why might it be of interest to them, or you?

The term 'data' refers to an item of information, or, items of information considered collectively for reference or analysis (OED). 'Data' applies across disciplines and could refer to statistics on the publication of comic books, DNA sequencing or, marine life in the Arctic - it can refer to countless sets of information.

The purpose of this post then is to enlighten readers about interesting and engaging ways that data are currently being presented and utilised on the web to inform the public about current issues, and other information available to them. For starters, did you know that everyone contributes to the growing wealth of digital data, whether you work in research or not? Take a look at this infographic from Mashable - every owner of a mobile phone, email address or iTunes account produces data in the digital age. You can also check out the impact of real-time tweets across the world via A World of Tweets.

The UK's newspaper The Guardian frequently experiments with public data and uses it to support current news stories. It has a dedicated 'Datablog' with the sole purpose of transforming data into useful and easily understandable formats about key issues important to the UK and globally. Some examples include: Water leakages: which company is the worst?; The world's top 100 airports: listed, ranked and mapped; Freedom of Information request 2011: how many were there and which ones were turned down?; or What does 15 years of baby name data tell us about modern Britain?.
The Guardian sites all sources of data and makes data freely available to every reader.

Other sites and services, and particularly research centers, make data available for download to use in your own way, or create visual representations for the reader or researcher. Visualisation and infographics are the terms generally used to describe this process and there are many tools available online that allow you to work with data in this way. A few examples of such tools include: Piktochart, Gephi, Tableau public and Taxgedo.

So where can you get public data?

Apart from researchers being increasingly required to share data, many governments are also opening up data for the public (see http://data.gov.uk, http://www.data.gov/ and http://data.gov.au). You can also try datacatalogs.org - a list of open data throughout the world; The Data Hub - where you can find, share and collaborate on data; Google Public Data; or, Freebase. But there are many places to acquire data if you do a simple online search or investigate your University's academic research centers and faculty websites.

Who is talking about data in the public realm?

Beyond the academic sphere, there are large communities online discussing data and its use in the public, as well as foundations geared towards data investigation. For example, the Knight Foundation in the US has organised the Civic Data Challenge whereby citizens of the US (aged thirteen and above) are invited to access, analyse, interpret and visualise data from Civic Health CPS datasets. In addition, there are many interested individuals proactively investigating, sharing and blogging about data. Here are a few sites worth checking and some blogs worth following: Visual.ly; Well-formed Data; Daily Infographic; Visualising Data; Visualising.org; The Guardian's Datablog; and a personal favourite - Information is Beautiful.

In this video, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful illustrates the importance (and perhaps playfulness) of contextualising research data and information through creative visual means.