Data infrastructure literacy

TLDR

A UN report calls for global data literacy to harness the data revolution, noting that data literacy typically involves numerical, statistical, and technical skills. The article proposes expanding data literacy to include understanding and engaging with the socio‑technical infrastructures that create, store, and analyze data—termed data infrastructure literacy—to enable collective inquiry, experimentation, and transformative action in education and beyond. The authors illustrate data infrastructure literacy with examples of inventive data practice drawn from open data, online platforms, data journalism, and data activism. They argue that data literacy initiatives can cultivate sensibilities in data science, data sociology, data politics, and broader public engagement with digital data infrastructures.

Abstract

A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended.