This spring, I taught a new Freshman Seminar at Princeton ( FRS 154) called “Weird Data,” a CDH course sponsored by the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. The goal of the course was to provide a wide-ranging introduction to the world of data in all its forms, ideas, and, well, weirdness. A key idea in this semester-long exploration was that data is not a single thing, nor is it usually as simple as we might assume.