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Data Biographies for Critical Data Pedagogy

Thu, August 31, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Fairfax A

Abstract

The rise of the open data movement, the widespread publication of government data on portals, and the proliferation of APIs has led to a new class of creative data consumers studied but rarely engaged by STS: journalists, entrepreneurs, media analysts, organizers, activists and artists who encounter data sets “in the wild.” These groups often have little to no knowledge about the varied collection processes, institutional logics, storage mechanisms, and unintended impacts of open data. The most well-supported open data sets provide data dictionaries, user guides, playbooks and other metadata to fill in the context that a spreadsheet leaves out. But for most publishers, just posting an .xls file online is a struggle. Accessible does not mean actionable. We frame this as a problem of critical data literacy: creative consumers of data must learn to read between the rows and columns. In order to both call attention to and address this challenge, we are developing new ways of seeing data’s entanglements. Our “data biographies” are principally pedagogical tools, useful for exploring how data sets came to be in the world. Instead of working forward to learn what data might reveal, creating a data biography means going backward to uncover why and how data were collected, and by and for whom. Our paper will explain how data biographies work, offer examples from our own classrooms, and comment on the pragmatic implications of putting data biographies into action.

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