Abstract
Working with data is an increasingly powerful way of making knowledge claims about the world. There is, however, a growing gap between those who can work effectively with data and those who cannot. Because it is state and corporate actors who possess the resources to collect, store and analyze data, individuals (e.g., citizens, community members, professionals) are more likely to be the subjects of data than to use data for civic purposes. There is a strong case to be made for cultivating data literacy for people in non-technical fields as one way of bridging this gap. Literacy, following the model of popular education proposed by Paulo Freire, requires not only the acquisition of technical skills but also the emancipation achieved through the literacy process. This article proposes the term creative data literacy to refer to the fact that non-technical learners may need pathways towards data which do not come from technical fields. Here I offer five tactics to cultivate creative data literacy for empowerment. They are grounded in my experience as a data literacy researcher, educator and software developer. Each tactic is explained and introduced with examples. I assert that working towards creative data literacy is not only the work of educators but also of data creators, data publishers, tool developers, tool and visualization designers, tutorial authors, government, community organizers and artists.
Highlights
Despite the grand hype around “Big Data” and the knowledge revolution it will create (Schönberger & Cukier 2013), there is profound inequality between those who are benefitting from the storage, collection and analysis of data and those who are not (Andrejevic 2014; boyd & Crawford 2012; Tufekci 2014)
Drawing from Paulo Freire’s popular education, literacy involves not just the acquisition of technical skills and the emancipation achieved through the literacy process (Freire 1968; Tygel & Kirsch 2015)
The question to be asked is: How do we go about empowering new learners with data? Rather than proposing a systematic framework for data literacy at scale, this paper offers five tactics for creative data literacy for empowerment
Summary
Despite the grand hype around “Big Data” and the knowledge revolution it will create (Schönberger & Cukier 2013), there is profound inequality between those who are benefitting from the storage, collection and analysis of data and those who are not (Andrejevic 2014; boyd & Crawford 2012; Tufekci 2014). People are far more likely to be discriminated against with data or surveilled with data than they are to use data for their own civic ends (O’Neil 2016). This has implications on how people do social science (Crawford et al 2014; Sandvig et al 2014; Welles 2014), practice law (Pasquale 2015), produce policy (Goldsmith & Crawford 2014), govern the city (Jacobs et al 2016) and create the news (Diakopoulos 2015; Kirchner 2016; D’Ignazio & Bhargava 2015), among other things. Cultivating data literacy in a more diverse population should be part of any solution or mitigating strategy for data inequality
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