In this class, we will aim to increase elements of our data literacy in order to expand the ways we can make knowledge (i.e., learn more for ourselves and others), arguments, and narratives about social and political issues. Catherine D’Ignazio and Rahul Bhargava (2015)[1] define data literacy as a culmination of:
- Reading data (i.e., understanding what it is and what it represents)
- Working with data (i.e., “creating, acquiring, cleaning, and managing it”)
- Analyzing data (i.e., “filtering, sorting, aggregating, comparing, and performing other such analytic operations on it”)
- Arguing with data (i.e., “using data to support a larger narrative intended to communicate some message to a particular audience”).
D’Ignazio and Bhargava (2015, p. 3) also point out three elements of “big” data literacy that will also be important for us to consider, especially for our final unit of the course:
- Identifying when and where data is being passively collected about your actions and interactions.
- Understanding the algorithmic manipulations performed on large sets of data to identify patterns.
- Weighing the real and potential ethical impacts of data-driven decisions for individuals and for society.
All of these elements of data literacy will be a focus of this course, with special attention to their application to writing and to social justice. The term “writing” here is used broadly, to encompass any act of composing with symbols (i.e., putting things together in order to make meaning). The term “social justice” can be applied to distribution of material goods (e.g., money, education, housing) and political goods (e.g., recognition, representation), to whom these goods are distributed, and how these goods should be distributed (see Fraser, 2009)[2].
Considering these elements of data literacy, writing, and social justice, here are the course objectives:
- Reading Data: Ethics, Limitations, Knowledge. We will expand our abilities in understanding how data are created, who creates them, what limitations particular data have in producing knowledge, and how its manifestations can have ethical ramifications on what it purports to represent. We will be able to ask critical questions of data we encounter, especially in terms of ethical considerations for what it purports to represent and limitations in the knowledge we can make with it.
- Processing Data: Managing And Analyzing Data. Related to the previous objective, we will use contextual knowledge of data sets we look at to make careful and ethical decisions on how to create, find, clean, maintain, sort, filter, compare, and do various kinds of exploratory and informed analyses of data relevant to things we want to learn more about. Related to the rhetorical canon of invention, we will be able to consider the available arguments to make using preliminary analyses, visualizations, and the full spectrum of the writing process to refine our thinking.
- Writing Data: Using Data to Argue and Tell Stories Toward Social Change. We will carefully consider how to make critical and ethical arguments and stories that are well supported by analyses of data. This will require considerations of the accuracy of our analyses, the accessibility of our findings, the situating of our findings within a larger conversation of research, sentence-level style work, organization of our argument or narrative, making effective visualizations, and considering the effects of integrating language with numbers in terms of persuasion.
- Reading, Writing, and Being Data: Social Justice and Data Saturation. The arguments and stories we create exist in a world that is saturated by data and data collection. We will consider how all people are considered data, the implications of this for social justice, and how to make arguments and stories that can circulate in such a world (e.g., respond to algorithmic as well as human audiences) as well as account for potential harms (e.g., dehumanization, privacy concerns).
[1] D’Ignazio, Catherine and Rahul Bhargava. 2015. “Approaches to Building Big Data Literacy.” Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference. 28 September 2015.
[2] Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of Justice. Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press.