This document discusses the importance of data preparation and understanding for data science projects. It notes that most of the work in any data project involves cleaning and preparing the data. The document emphasizes gaining both syntactic and semantic understanding of data through techniques like determining true data types, analyzing data density and distributions, and identifying equivalences. It also discusses how data understanding can reveal problems over time. Finally, it stresses the need for data science teams to be involved in the hands-on work of data transformation and understanding.