Abstract
Data science skills are rapidly becoming a necessity in modern science. In response to this need, institutions and organizations around the world are developing research data science curricula to teach the programming and computational skills that are needed to build and maintain data infrastructures and maximize the use of available data. To date, however, few of these courses have included an explicit ethics component, and developing such components can be challenging. This paper describes a novel approach to teaching data ethics on short courses developed for the CODATA-RDA Schools for Research Data Science. The ethics content of these schools is centred on the concept of open and responsible (data) science citizenship that draws on virtue ethics to promote ethics of practice. Despite having little formal teaching time, this concept of citizenship is made central to the course by distributing ethics content across technical modules. Ethics instruction consists of a wide range of techniques, including stand-alone lectures, group discussions and mini-exercises linked to technical modules. This multi-level approach enables students to develop an understanding both of “responsible and open (data) science citizenship”, and of how such responsibilities are implemented in daily research practices within their home environment. This approach successfully locates ethics within daily data science practice, and allows students to see how small actions build into larger ethical concerns. This emphasises that ethics are not something “removed from daily research” or the remit of data generators/end users, but rather are a vital concern for all data scientists.
Highlights
Modern life is exponentially generating an increasing amount of data (Hey and Trefethen 2003)
Central to effectively navigating this “data deluge” are individuals skilled in the tools necessary to manage, curate and analyse data1 online. While such tasks have been historically within the remit of general data management and statistics, it is becoming apparent that the growing complexity of the data landscape requires wider familiarity with programming and computational skills
How best to teach these data science tools has been the topic of considerable discussion (Attwood et al 2017)
Summary
Modern life is exponentially generating an increasing amount of data (Hey and Trefethen 2003). SRDS are two-week residential courses designed to build core data science skills, and to introduce open tools and resources for researchers. After selecting open and responsible (data) science citizenship as the orienting concept, the course designers had to identify content to teach.
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