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Data Literacy

What is data literacy?

Here are a few definitions of data literacy from the web:

 

Data literacy includes: 
  • Being a critical consumer of data, statistics, and visualizations
  • Understanding the context of data, statistics, and visualizations in the news, in academics, on the Internet, and in other areas
    • Asking the following questions about the data, statistic, or visualization: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
    • Considering correlation versus causation
  • Finding, evaluating, analyzing, using, and creating data, statistics, and data visualizations responsibly

What is data?

Quantitative data

  • Includes: counts, numbers, measurements, statistics

Qualitative data

  • Includes: words, interview transcripts, comments on a survey

Data Information Literacy

Data literacy is not "data information literacy," which is about managing and preserving data (from research, generally), as defined by Jake Carlson and Linda Johnston in their book: