Data literacy

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Data literacy is the ability to read, understand, create and communicate data as information. Much like literacy as a general concept, data literacy focuses on the competencies involved in working with data. As data collection and sharing become routine and data analysis and big data become common ideas in the news, business, government and society, it becomes more and more important for students, citizens, and readers to have some data literacy.

Video Data literacy

Related terms

Data literacy focuses on the ability to understand and build knowledge from data, and to communicate that meaning to others. It is related to other fields, including:

• Statistical literacy
• Media literacy
• Information literacy
• New literacies
• Numeracy
• Transliteracy
• 21st-century skills

Maps Data literacy

Definitions

• When focused on understanding scientific data, data literacy emphasizes the numeric, statistical nature of data as information, including "... understanding what data mean, including how to read graphs and charts appropriately, draw correct conclusions from data, and recognize when data are being used in misleading or inappropriate ways."
• When focused on educating a population, data literacy involves "... the knowledge of what data are, how they are collected, analyzed, visualized and shared, and is the understanding of how data are applied for benefit or detriment, within the cultural context of security and privacy."
• When focused on citizen-design, data literacy is "... the ability to ask and answer real-world questions from large and small data sets through an inquiry process, with consideration of ethical use of data. It is based on core practical and creative skills, with the ability to extend knowledge of specialist data handling skills according to goals. These include the abilities to select, clean, analyse, visualise, critique and interpret data, as well as to communicate stories from data and to use data as part of a design process."
• When focused narrowly on the skills employers hope to find in their workers, data literacy means "... competence in finding, manipulating, managing, and interpreting data, including not just numbers but also text and images."

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Applications

• The Data Journalism Handbook trains journalists in data literacy.
• Education

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Libraries and Data Literacy

As guides for finding and using information, librarians lead workshops on data literacy for students and researchers, and also work on developing their own data literacy skills.

Resources created by librarians include MIT's Data Management and Publishing tutorial, the EDINA Research Data Management Training (MANTRA), the University of Edinburgh's Data Library and the University of Minnesota libraries' Data Management Course for Structural Engineers.

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References

Source of the article : Wikipedia