Place-Making Practices With COVID-19 Data

• In Event: Data Literacy in Context: Culturally Oriented and Place-Based Learning Through Data

Abstract

How can we apprentice learners to data practices with which they can enact social changes in their communities? To answer this question, we need to better understand how societal understandings are mediated by sensemaking with data. In our conceptual framing, data are not
viewed as straightforward conduits from sign to meaning, but rather are brought into multiple meanings through the ways in which they are narrated (Dourish & Gómez Cruz, 2018). Data narrators act and are acted upon through dialogue between the narratives that they construct and the surrounding narratives of society (Bakhtin, 1981). We studied a group of adults’ routine data practices during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data-rich information ecology of COVID-19 (Cuan-Baltazar, et al., 2020) provided a fertile context for observing people making sense of data in ways that are personally meaningful and consequential. In
online think-aloud interviews, participants navigated to online resources they routinely used, and explained how they used and made sense of these data.
One of the practices through which people construct social meanings with data is the process of place-making (Taylor, et al., 2018) – discursively bringing a place into being and imbuing it with meanings, purposes and affordances for identity development. We analyzed the narratives they produced (Radinsky, 2020) in order to identify place-making practices through which participants constructed relationships among themselves, data, information sources, and people and places in the represented worlds of their narratives. In this poster, we present and discuss these place-making processes which include:
1. Periodizations of COVID-19: rendering aspects of the pandemic into historical space- time frames
2. Selectively problematizing: constructing some place-referenced information as expected and others as requiring explanation; data glossed over by some participants triggered deliberation for others as a function of their affinity groups or disciplinary identification
3. Explaining interpretations of data in terms of (real or imagined) mediating social relationships
Understanding the nature and variations of these practices can extend our conception of data literacy beyond academic problem-solving (Tabak, 2020). This understanding can inform the design of learning environments that foster relational and place-referenced aspects of data literacy.

Authors

• Joshua L. Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Iris Tabak, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev