Toolkit Testing Option 3

   AMCHA Initiative

  Date: 2023   //     Author: AMCHA

The AMCHA Initiative investigates, documents, educates about, and combats antisemitism at institutions of higher education in the United States. An open-access database of antisemitic activity on U.S. college and university campuses is available on their data advocacy website.

Keywords:  Social Advocacy   Public Good   Mapping   Database   “Hate Tracking"  

   Air Pollution and Public Health in the South Bronx

  Date: 2023   //     Author: South Bronx Unite

South Bronx Unite is a local environmental justice organization that leads data advocacy projects to champion better air quality, public health, and green space access for residents in the Bronx neighborhoods of Mott Haven and Port Morris. This resource provides an overview of their efforts to document the longstanding industrial air pollution in the area that continues to afflict local residents’ health. The organization contextualizes their comprehensive data visualizations with commentary about the political history and socioeconomic factors that have led to the current situation. In addition to having students explore the South Bronx Unite data advocacy website, it may also be helpful to have them read a couple of the news stories (collected on the “Press & Media” page) that reporters have written about the organization’s efforts and their contribution to the borough’s future plans and zoning policies.

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   Air Pollution   Environmental Justice   Persuading with Data  

   An Introduction to Data Ethics

  Date: 2018-01-23   //     Author: Shannon Vallor and William Rewak

This reading, divided into five parts, introduces students to the ethics of data practice and includes discussions about data benefits and harms; challenges and obligations of ethical data practice; and ethical frameworks and best practices for data practitioners.

Keywords:  data ethics   public good   data advocacy  

   Analysis of Theodore Roosevelt’s Reelection Flyer (lesson plan)

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

In this 20-minute in-class activity, students rhetorically analyze the flyer “Stand Pat Under Present Prosperity,” published by Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection campaign in 1904. The flyer is a masterful piece of visual rhetoric that affords excellent opportunities for students to analyze the careful choices by the designers that make the visualization more convincing.

Keywords:  Visual Rhetoric   Rhetoric of Data Visualization  

   Attending to the Cultures of Data Science Work

  Date: 2023   //     Author: Lindsay Poirier

This essay argues that data science communities have a responsibility to attend not only to the cultures that orient the work of domain communities, but also to the cultures that orient their own work. The author also describes how ethnographic frameworks such as thick description can be enlisted to encourage more reflexive data science work.

Keywords:  Data Culture   Data Infrastructure   Science and Technology Studies   Ethnography   Data Documentation  

   Black Health in America: Exploring Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Vaccination Data

  Date: February 24, 2021   //     Author: Jamelle Watson-Daniels/Data for Black Lives

This Data Advocacy project assists public health efforts to make visible existing racial disparities in our healthcare system, specifically in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. This project asks "Are Black people, who remain overrepresented among COVID-19 deaths, receiving sufficient access to the vaccines?" Data findings presented in a chart "help to visualize the gap between how many Black people are dying from COVID-19 and how many are receiving the vaccine."

Keywords:  Data Advocacy   Data for Black Lives   Public Health Data   Critical Data Studies  

   Caregiving is Real Work

  Date: October 2023   //     Author: Sharmi Surianarain

This presentation aims to capture the economic value of unpaid care work, which amounts to about 16 billion hours daily on a global basis. Surianarain draws on data to convey the immense scale and importance of caregiving, arguing that unpaid care work is what makes many forms of paid work possible. She then advocates for new workplace norms that might better accommodate this unpaid caregiving that paid workers often perform alongside their day jobs. This presentation’s 5-minute length makes it especially valuable as a model for student assignments.

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   Care Work   Persuading with Data  

   Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach

  Date: March 16, 2020   //     Author: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein

In this chapter of Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein not only emphasize the ways data can both reinforce and challenge systems of oppression but also introduce notions and examples of data ethics so that practioners are better prepared to work toward equity and co-liberation in their data practices.

Keywords:  Data Feminism   Critical Data Studies   Data Justice   Data Ethics   Power Structures  

   Critical Data Studies: An Introduction

  Author: Andrew Iliadis and Federica Russo

In this scholarly essay, the authors identify the relations between data and power and, among other things, briefly describe the framework of Critical Data Studies, its orientations, and principles.

Keywords:  data as power   big data   critical data studies  

   Critically Analyzing the World Happiness Report

  Date: 2023   //     Author: J. F. Helliwell, Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., Aknin, L. B., De Neve, J.-E., & Wang, S. , eds.

This activity invites students to think about the variables included in the World Happiness Report dataset, about the relations between variables, and about the advantages and disadvantages of the authors’ approach to measuring happiness. This exercise is designed to help cultivate habits of critical reflection and to provide practice in data analysis, including reflection on correlation.

Keywords:  World happiness   Global data   Data analysis   Critical reflection  

   Data Cleaning

  Author: Alice Macfarlan

In this brief article, Alice Macfarlan describes the motivation behind careful data preparation and outlines a set of steps and questions to ask oneself when preparing data. Macfarlan also provides links to more information about the process of and motivation for cleaning data.

Keywords:  data preparation   data cleaning   bad data   data analysis  

   Data Ethics Unveiled: Principles & Frameworks Explored

  Date: 2023-11-28   //     Author: Atlan

This blog post, intended for a quick read, defines data ethics; identifies various reasons as to why data ethics is so important; outlines useful frameworks, guiding principles, and challenges of data ethics; and describes real world examples of data ethics, including the situations, concerns, and outcomes of each.

Keywords:  Data Ethics   Frameworks   Guiding Principles   Data Ethics Examples  

   Data Feminism

  Author: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. [Read More]

   Data Harm Record

  Date: August 2020   //     Author: Joanna Redden, Jessica Brand and Vanesa Terzieva

This online document provides a running record of “data harms”--specifically harms that have been caused by uses of algorithmic systems. The social advocacy goal is to promote learning and inspire collaborative work to redress harms and prevent further harm.

   Data Harms

  Date: August 2020   //     Author: Joanna Redden, Jessica Brand, and Vanesa Terzieva

According to Joanna Redden, Jessica Brand and Vanesa Terzieva, we can think about data harms as “the adverse effects caused by uses of data that may impair, injure, or set back a person, entity or society’s interests.”

   Data Stewardship

  Date: March 15, 2016   //     Author: Mark Wilkinson et al

Data stewardship can be understood as the “ ‘long-term care’ of valuable digital assets, with the goal that they should be discovered and re-used for downstream investigations, either alone, or in combination with newly generated data” (Wilkinson et al).

Keywords:  Digital Assets   Data Reusability   Data Reproducibility  

   Data Storytelling: How to Effectively Tell a Story with Data

  Date: November 2021   //     Author: Catherine Cote

In this article, Catherine Cote invokes recent research psychology to show that, in most cases, human brains are wired to prefer making meaning out of stories rather than raw data. Emphasizing organizational communication and business contexts, the article offers a useful, quasi-literary framework for doing data storytelling that adopts concepts such as setting, character, and conflict.

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   Data Stories   Persuading with Data  

   Data Visualisation and Advocacy for Sexual and Gender Minority Health

  Date: November 16, 2022   //     Author: Janina Mueller

This paper provides a pedagogical primer on how to incorporate data and GIS-based advocacy into the classroom curriculum by offering a case study of LGBTQIA+ health challenges and barriers. In the paper’s Appendix, the paper’s author provides a sample lesson plan that invites students to critically evaluate maps and data visualizations.

Keywords:  Maps   Geospatial Data   Healthcare   Social justice  

   Data, Ethics, and Society

  Date: 2022   //     Author: Julian Chambliss et al.

This section of the open access book, Making Sense of Digital Humanities, offers a variety of readings that discuss ethical concerns related to data, technology, and communities. Themes include but are not limited to: data and race, data and discrimination, algorithms and oppression, and coded biases.

Keywords:  Data Ethics   Data Humanities   Black Studies   Racialized Technologies   Algorithms  

   Demonstrating Causation (slide deck)

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck reviews the problem of correlation and causation. It provides a quick mathematical review of what correlation is, followed by a look at the difference between correlation and causation and a high-level overview of three requirements in proving causation. The slide deck with instructor notes could be used as a reading or an activity.

Keywords:  Causation vs Correlation   Statistical Thinking   Critical Data Studies  

   Deon Ethics Checklist for Data Scientists

  Author: Driven Data

This online tutorial introduces you to Deon, which is a command line tool that generates an ethics checklist to help decide if a data project is ethical. This tutorial explains how one can create a custom checklist or use a default checklist split into different sections based upon the stage of ones project. This tutorial also includes a bibliography of readings about data ethics.

Keywords:  Checklists   Ethics   Data Science   Coding  

   Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder

  Date: September 16, 2013   //     Author: Malcom Gladwell

In this 2013 talk at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, Malcolm Gladwell sets out to explain why, at almost every university in the United States, college students drop out of STEM majors at an alarmingly consistent rate. While Gladwell references data on STEM education throughout the talk, he frames his engagement with the statistics in the manner of a detective story to lend compelling narrative tension to his presentation. He examines student STEM degree attainment statistics at several universities, from Harvard to Hartwick, to advance his insight that earning a STEM degree appears to be a function of a student’s class rank and not primarily a function of a student’s cognitive abilities (e.g., standardized tests scores). To make this counterintuitive finding more palatable, Gladwell contextualizes his analysis of the data with a concept psychologists call “relative deprivation,” which suggests that individuals generally assess their own abilities and aptitudes in comparison to those [Read More]

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   STEM Education   Persuading with Data  

   Evaluating Statistical Claims

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck, which can be used as a reading or an activity, briefly introduces nine questions to ask when evaluating the validity of a statistical claim. It then provides a series of statistical claims for students to evaluate and ends by asking students to apply this same type of evaluation to a statistical claim from their own project.

Keywords:  Statistical Thinking   Statistical Claims   Statistics   Quantitative Rhetoric   Data-driven Argument  

   Exploring the Geography of Systemic Racism With Spatial Data Science

  Date: July 16, 2024   //     Author: Ranganath, Aditya

This tutorial provides a step-by-step introduction to making maps in R, an open-source programming language commonly used by data scientists. Instead of making maps using a point-and-click interface (as in the QGIS tutorial), students will learn to write basic code in the R programming language. Substantively, the tutorial leverages data from the Open Policing Project at Stanford University to make a map of county-level variation in racially biased traffic policing practices in the state of Colorado. Given the diversity and richness of the Stanford Open Policing Project dataset, instructors could easily adapt the lesson by using data on states or geographic locales relevant to their students. At the end of the tutorial, students are invited to explore various questions that invite them to think broadly about the relationship between maps and effective data advocacy.

Keywords:  Policing   Systemic Racism   Geographic Information Systems   Spatial Data Science   R Programming Language  

   FAIR Principles

  Author: Go FAIR

A resource that provides a condensed summary of the FAIR principles for data management and stewardship, based on Wilkenson et al’s original article. Click on the blue links for a fuller description of each principle or sub-principle. A free PDF download is also available.

Keywords:  Digital Assets   Data Reusability   Data Reproducibility   “Data Management”   “Data Stewardship”  

   FAIR: Foundational Principles for Good Data Management and Stewardship

  Date: March 15, 2016   //     Author: Mark Wilkinson et al

The FAIR principles function as a guide for data publishers and stewards to help render data and digital assets so that they are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

Keywords:  Digital Assets   Data Reusability   Data Reproducibility   “Data Management”   “Data Stewardship”  

   FBI Hate Crimes Dataset (2021)

  Date: 2022   //     Author: United States Department of Justice

The FBI tracks hate crimes in many different ways; this summary dataset from 2021 focuses on specific types of crimes and numbers of incidents, victims and known offenders. The dataset provides an excellent resource for inviting students to explore and think critically about data. This activity prompts students to think about how data represents phenomena and to think critically about the kinds of choices that go into creating a dataset.

Keywords:  datasets   data biography   critical data analysis   hate crime data  

   Framing Statistics

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck, which can be used as a reading or an activity, introduces students to the rhetorical framework of framing theory and explores how this framework can be applied to study and generate statistics and statistical claims.

Keywords:  Statistics   Quantitative Rhetoric   Statistical Claims   Data-driven Argument  

   Gapminder World Health Chart Activity

  Date: 2022   //     Author: Gapminder

The World Health Chart on Gapminder's website is an interactive visualization tool that displays the relationship between income and life expectancy for countries worldwide. It presents this data as a graph where the x-axis represents income (GDP per capita) and the y-axis represents life expectancy. Each country is represented by a bubble, with the size of the bubble indicating population size. The chart allows users to view data from 1800 to 2021, showing how countries have progressed over time in terms of health and wealth. Users can play an animation to see the changes occur dynamically or search for specific countries. The page includes a video explanation by Hans Rosling, demonstrating the correlation between income and health across nations. It also offers downloadable resources such as printable PDFs, presentation files, and a fullscreen version of the chart.

Keywords:  Health data   Global income   Data visualization   “Data Analysis”   Gapminder  

   Getting Started with Data for Advocacy (slide deck)

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck introduces basic principles behind numerical argumentation. It demonstrates that single numbers are good for showing sizes, and two or more numbers are good for comparisons, but entire datasets are necessary to show patterns. It prepares students to recognize what is and isn’t a dataset when they are searching for data online, briefly discusses ways to find data for advocacy, and briefly mentions U.S. privacy laws that govern data availability (HIPAA and FERPA). The slide deck with instructor notes could be used as a reading or an activity.

Keywords:  Quantitative Rhetoric   Numerical Argumentation   Finding Datasets   Data Privacy Laws  

   How to Create a Data Visualization

  Date: July 31, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

These slides explain two different step-by-step methods for creating high-quality, professional-looking data visualizations without needing to pay for software or learn to code. They are intended to follow the Introduction to Data Visualization videos and provide a lead-in to the Create an Original Data Visualization assignment sequence. The slide deck with instructor notes could be used as a reading or an activity.

Keywords:  Visual Rhetoric   Rhetoric of Data Visualization  

   Interview with Catherine D’Ignazio: 'Data is Never a Raw, Truthful Input – and It is Never Neutral'

  Date: March 21, 2020   //     Author: Zoë Corbyn

In this interview, the co-author of Data Feminism identifies how how sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination manifest in data products and emphasizes, among other things, the importance of recognising discrimination in algorithms, understanding how it operates on a technical level, and designing measures to stamp it out.

   Introduction to Data Visualization (videos)

  Date: August 22, 2021   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

In 25 minutes of total runtime, these two videos provide a concise in-depth introduction to the rhetorical principles of data visualization. The first video summarizes the history of persuasive visualizations with three key examples from the 19th century by John Snow, Florence Nightingale, and W.E.B. DuBois. The second video lays out six key principles of data visualization and explains what can go wrong when these principles are violated.

Keywords:  Rhetoric of Data Visualization   History of Data Visualization  

   Managing and Sharing Data

  Date: “2011-03-16”   //     Author: Veerle Van den Eynden, Louise Corti, Matthew Woollard, Libby Bishop and Laurence Horton.

This guide is designed to help researchers and data managers produce high quality research data with potential for long-term use. Content covers best practices for documenting, formatting, and storing data as well as legal and ethical issues for consideration.

Keywords:  “Data Management”   “Data Lifecycle”  

   Mapping Broadband Health in America

  Date: October 24, 2023   //     Author: Connect2HealthFCC Task Force

Mapping Broadband Health in America 2023, is a useful example of how data advocacy is often used in the field of public health. This project enables users to visualize, intersect, and analyze broadband and health data at the national, state and county levels – informing policy and program prescriptions, future innovations, and investment decisions.

Keywords:  Public health  

   Mapping Police Violence

  Author: We the Protestors-Campaign Zero

This interactive website features a collection of live tracking tools, maps, and visualizations that document police violence in the United States and demonstrate how race and ethnicity, location, and crime are connected to police violence. To assist various stakeholders, visitors can download open-access data and figures, learn about the project’s methodology, and access a resource to directly contact representatives.

Keywords:  Advocacy   Data Practice   Black Data Studies   Accountability   Data Visualization  

   Mapping for Data Advocacy with Quantum Geographic Information Systems (QGIS)

  Date: October 10, 2023   //     Author: Ranganath, Aditya

This tutorial provides a step-by-step introduction to the process of making a basic choropleth map in Quantum Geographic Information Systems (QGIS), a widely used and supported open-source geospatial application. The tutorial uses data on student debt, and invites students to replicate a map of state-level variation in average student debt levels (in the United States) that was produced by the Institute for College Access and Success. The process of making this map that represents information about a salient contemporary issue invites students to reflect on ways in which map-making can play a role in their data advocacy efforts.

Keywords:  QGIS   Spatial Data   Student debt   Geographic Information Systems   Cartography  

   Mapping, Society, and Technology

  Author: Manson, S.M. (ed.)

This online, open-source textbook provides an excellent introduction to digital mapping that includes topics such as reading, using, and creating maps. A central focus of the text is the relationship between cartography and broader societal and technological developments. It also includes topics related to geospatial data ethics, the history of maps and mapping, and maps as rhetorical devices. Instructors can select chapters in this book to provide students with essential background information and context before moving into more hands-on cartography instruction; the background material provided in this text will allow students to approach the task of making their own data-advocacy related maps with greater insight, sophistication, and integrity.

Keywords:  Maps and society   Geospatial data   Maps and rhetoric   History of maps and mapping  

   Maps as Advocacy (slide deck)

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck provides an introduction to the ways in which maps can advocate for policies and positions. It uses concepts from critical cartography to challenge the notion that any map can be truly objective. The slide deck with instructor notes could be used as a reading or an activity.

Keywords:  Critical Cartography   Visual Rhetoric   Rhetoric of Data Visualization  

   Maps, Mapmaking, and Critical Pedagogy: Exploring GIS and Maps as a Teaching Tool for Social Change

  Date: November 01, 2009   //     Author: Denise Pacheco and Veronica Nelly Fernandez

This article approaches Geographic Information Systems and cartography from the perspective of critical pedagogy, and explores how maps can used as instruments of social change and tools of data-based advocacy.

Keywords:  Critical pedagogy   Geographic Information Systems   Critical geography  

   Matthew J.C. Crump, ‘Correlation’

  Date: September 01, 2018   //     Author: Matthew J.C. Crump

This chapter from Crump’s textbook, _Answering Questions with Data_, provides an accessible and illuminating discussion of the phenomena of covariation, correlation, and the difference between correlation and causation. The reading can provide the basis of a classroom discussion about these key concepts in statistical analysis. Paired with other datasets in the Data Advocacy Toolkit, the reading can help students develop the tools they need to calculate and begin to think critically about the concept of causation..

Keywords:  “Correlation"   Causation   Statistical analysis  

   Of Oaths and Checklists

  Date: July 17, 2018   //     Author: DJ Patil, Hilary Mason and Mike Loukides

This reading discusses the value of using checklists for data projects and offers a checklist with 13 valuable questions to ask by people working on them.

Keywords:  Data Management   Ethics   Checklist  

   Philadelphia African-American Census 1847

  Author: Friends Historical Library

In 1847, Philadelphia Quakers conducted a census of the city’s African American population. Their intention was to document the existence of an “industrious and thriving” portion of that population, and also to discover what sectors of the community may have been in need of attention and assistance. Over 150 years later, the original data - held in manuscript at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College - proves a rich resource for studying African American history, genealogy, Philadelphia history, and more.

   Principles for Advancing Equitable Data Practice

  Date: June 2020   //     Author: Marcus Gaddy and Kassie Scott

In this blog post, Gaddy and Scott share highlights from the session around what data equity means, why ‘data is objective’ is a myth, and how you can begin to build a more equitable data practice.

   Raw Data

  Date: January 25, 2013   //     Author: Geoffrey Bowker, Lisa Gitelman, and Virginia Jackson

Data never exists in a “raw,” unfiltered form and is never a neutral representation of reality.

Keywords:  Critical Data Studies   Data Collection  

   SPLC Hate Map

  Author: Southern Poverty Law Center

This data advocacy project tracks hate and anti-government groups across the United States.

Keywords:  Social Advocacy   Public Good   Mapping   Data Visualization   “Hate Tracking”  

   Sovereign Bodies Institute

  Date: 2023   //     Author: Sovereign Bodies Institute

As stated on their website, “Sovereign Bodies Institute (SBI) builds on Indigenous traditions of data gathering and knowledge transfer to create, disseminate, and put into action research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people.” On their website, you can access the MMIP Database, which “logs cases of missing and murdered indigenous people of all genders and ages, from 1900 to the present.”

Keywords:  Social Advocacy   Public Good   Mapping   Indigenous Rights   “Data Sovereignty”  

   Strangers in the Dataset

  Date: March 2020   //     Author: Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein

This section from chapter five of D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism takes a critical look at the metaphor of “cleaning” data, assesses the implications of thinking about data in this way, and challenges readers to think more deeply about the assumptions that guide data the data gathering and preparation process.

Keywords:  data analysis   justice   representation   data cleaning  

   Strategies for Analyzing and Composing Data Stories

  Date: 2023-9   //     Author: Angela M. Laflen

This book chapter by Angela Laflen situates data stories as a genre of multimodal writing, while emphasizing the specific rhetorical skills that data storytelling requires. Data stories, Laflen explains, often take the form of social media infographs or online feature articles, and they involve combining data with words and images to tell a story or make an argument. The defining goal of the genre is to make data comprehensible and compelling, so that the insights to be gleaned from a dataset might be readily grasped by readers in a manner that will inform their decision making. Laflen’s piece also outlines a rhetorical framework for analyzing and creating data stories with students in university classroom contexts.

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   Data Stories   Persuading with Data  

   Swastika Counter Project

  Date: 2023   //     Author: Laurie Gries and Kelly Wheeler

The Swastika Counter Project is a public humanities project that aims to educate the general public about the targets, circulation, and intensity of antisemitic signs on the streets of the United States. To support community stakeholders, this data advocacy website aims to provide reliable data, relevant research findings, and useful educational resources.

Keywords:  Advocacy   Data Practice   Rhetorical Data Studies   Accountability   Data Visualization  

   The Ethics of Managing People’s Data

  Date: May 22, 2022   //     Author: Michael Segalla and Dominique Rouziès

This reading discusses the ethics of working with data from a business perspective and describes 5 key principles of ethical data handling: provenance, purpose, protection, privacy, and preparation.

Keywords:  Business   Ethics   Data Management   AI  

   The Fair Guiding Principles For Scientific Data Management And Stewardship

  Date: March 15, 2016   //     Author: Mark Wilkinson et al

This article identifies practical guidelines for data management and data stewardship so that data can be published and preserved in ways that ensure transparency, reproducibility, and reusability.

Keywords:  Data Management   Data Stewardship   Data Reusability   Data Transparency   Data Reproducibility  

   The History of Data-as-Rhetoric

  Date: September 2016   //     Author: Mark Carrigan

This blog post emphasizes how the definition of data is ever changing, as it shifts with argumentative strategy and context.

   The Importance of Data Cleaning: Three Visualization Examples

  Date: February 2020   //     Author: Christine P. Chai

This article, published in the online journal *CHANCE* by the American Statistical Association, provides examples of how inadequate data preparation can dramatically impact analysis and presents case studies that demonstrate why data inspection and preparation is such an important part of the data science life cycle.

Keywords:  data preparation   data cleaning   bad data   data analysis  

   The Limits of Data

  Date: 2024   //     Author: C. Thi Nguyen

In this opinion piece for Issues in Science and Technology, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that data creation is a process of decontextualization. Nguyen also explains the politics of classification and metrics and ultimately calls for a critical approach to data. This article provides an excellent introduction to critical data studies, although it does not use that term.

Keywords:  Critical Data Studies   Classification   Decontextualization   Metrics  

   The Point of Collection

  Date: February 10, 2016   //     Author: Mimi Onuoha

In this article, Mimi Onuoha presents five theses about data collection that are important to keep in mind while working with data.

Keywords:  Data Collection   Critical Data Studies   Data Transparency   Data Ethics  

   The Truth about Human Population Decline

  Date: April 2023   //     Author: Jennifer D. Sciubba

In this presentation, political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba tells a data-driven story about global population trends and some ways governments might plan for them. While the world’s total population continues to grow, the global fertility rate has been plummeting for decades, and this will make for a significant population decline by the next century. In many countries, the share of citizens over the age of 60 will increase from around 15% to over 30% within the next 100 years. Considering these demographic projections, Sciubba asks, “what possible worlds might we create if we thoughtfully planned for an older, smaller population?” She then moves to outline three possible scenarios in an attempt to dramatize a spectrum of possible outcomes we might move toward. As a pedagogical model to inspire student work, this presentation is interesting for the way it uses both historical data and future projections to underscore the long-term consequences [Read More]

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   Demography   Immigration   Persuading with Data  

   The What, Where and How of Data for Data Science

  Date: June 2018   //     Author: Iliya Valchanov

This blog post unpacks the notion of data from a data science perspective while also unpacking the complexity of data science and offering a useful infographic to explain the key processes of data science.

   Thick Data (slide deck)

  Date: September 06, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck introduces the concept of “thick data” (Wang 2013) using Clifford Geertz’s classic example of the difference between a wink and a blink (or squint). It references both C. Thi Nguyen’s “The Limits of Data” (2024) and Tricia Wang’s “Why Big Data Needs Thick Data” (2013) and can reinforce concepts introduced to students via those readings, or else substitute for them.

Keywords:  Thick Data   Ethnography   Thick Description  

   Thick Data vs. Big Data

  Date: January 20, 2016   //     Author: Tricia Wang

According to Tricia Wang, it is important to understand what thick data is and why it is valuable, especially in an age when Big Data gets all the hype. According to Wang, “Thick Data is data brought to light using qualitative, ethnographic research methods that uncover people’s emotions, stories, and models of their world. It’s the sticky stuff that’s difficult to quantify. It comes to us in the form of a small sample size and in return we get an incredible depth of meanings and stories. Thick Data is the opposite of Big Data, which is quantitative data at a large scale that involves new technologies around capturing, storing, and analyzing. For Big Data to be analyzable, it must use normalizing, standardizing, defining, clustering, all processes that strips the the data set of context, meaning, and stories. Thick Data can rescue Big Data from the context-loss that comes with the [Read More]

Keywords:  Thick Data   Big Data   Ethnography   Qualitative Research   Keyword 5  

   Three Creative Ways to Fix Fashion’s Waste Problem

  Date: November 2017   //     Author: Amit Kalra

In this presentation, Kalra blends personal accounts of his life in the fashion industry with data about consumer habits, the afterlives of our clothes, and the natural resources used to create new garments. The fashion industry’s environmental footprint is second only to oil and gas, and Kalra excels at framing the industry’s waste statistics through analogies and images that put these numbers into sharp perspective for a lay audience. On the basis of this data, he then proposes a series of solutions (composable fabrics, recyclable clothing, dying clothes with spices instead of chemicals) that each promise to bring measurable reductions in waste. As a model for student presentations, Kalra’s talk is particularly notable the rhetorical strategies he uses to make giant, global statistics resonate clearly and vividly on a personal scale.

Keywords:  Data Storytelling   Waste   Persuading with Data  

   To Visualize or Not to Visualize? (slide deck)

  Date: July 27, 2024   //     Author: Nathan Pieplow

This slide deck asks students to consider the ways in which data visualizations, and visual rhetoric more broadly, can either help or fail to help an argument. It encourages students to evaluate the ethos, pathos, and logos of a visual, as well as how it responds to the exigence, audience, and purpose. It provides criteria and practice in distinguishing between actual data visualizations and the mere decorations that are so common in infographics. It also gives examples of situations in which words alone may remain more powerful than visuals. The slide deck with instructor notes could be used as a reading or an activity.

Keywords:  Rhetoric of Data Visualization   Infographics   Visual Rhetoric  

   Understanding and Applying Key Statistical Concepts

  Date: April 23, 2022   //     Author: Douglas Shafer and Zhiyi Zhang

Douglas Shafer and Zhiyi Zhang’s open source textbook, Introductory Statistics, provides in its opening chapter a basic introduction to some of the key concepts and terms that form the basis of statistical analysis. The resource provides an opportunity for students to begin developing a basic understanding of how statisticians view the world and produce knowledge about the world.

Keywords:  kinds of data   population   descriptive statistics   inferential statistics   sample  

   Virulent Hate Project

  Date: 2023   //     Author: Melissa Borja

This data advocacy project investigates anti-Asian racism by identifying, analyzing, and mapping incidents of anti-Asian harassment, violence, discrimination, and stigmatization. In addition, this project studies how Asian American activism takes place on local, state, and national levels in order to better understand how individuals and communities are responding to the recent surge in anti-Asian racism and violence.

Keywords:  Social Advocacy   Public Good   Mapping   Data Visualization  

   What Gets Counted Counts

  Date: March 2020   //     Author: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein

In Chapter 4 of their book Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein urge us “to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression.”

Keywords:  Data Classification   Intersectional Feminism   Gender Binary   Quantification  

   What does Critical Data Studies look like and Why do we Care?

  Date: May 12, 2014   //     Author: Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher

This online post presents seven key provocations as to why a critique of data, “big” or not, is important. In addition to discussing the potentials of counter data, the authors describe, in particular, how geographers and others interested in working with spatial data might benefit from a critical data studies approach.

Keywords:  critical data studies   big data   counter data   spatial data   geography  

   What is Data Governance and why does it Matter?

  Date: February 2011   //     Author: National Forum on Education Statistics

This book chapter defines what data governance is and identifies several of its affordances–from improving data quality to increasing data usefulness to providing timelier access and enhanced security.

Keywords:  Data Management   Data Stewardship   Data Governance  

   What is Data? Definition and Examples

  Author: Market Business News

This article offers a general understanding of data for the field of business and includes a glossary of related terms as well as two educational videos about what data is and what data storytelling is.

   Why Big Data Needs Thick Data

  Date: January 20, 2016   //     Author: Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang calls for the importance of integrating “thick data” alongside “big data,” or qualitative insights gathered from human interactions, emotions, and stories. These can fill the gaps left by big data, offering a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior and aiding in better decision-making.

Keywords:  Big Data   Thick Data   Ethnography  

   World Happiness Report (2023)

  Date: 2023   //     Author: Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., Aknin, L. B., De Neve, J.-E., & Wang, S. , eds.

The World Happiness Report 2023 website presents the 11th edition of this annual publication, which measures and ranks countries based on their citizens' happiness and well-being. The report includes several chapters covering topics such as trust and social connections during crises, state effectiveness, altruism's impact on well-being, and using social media to measure well-being across cultures and time. The site provides access to the full report, its executive summary, individual chapters, and downloadable data sets used in the analysis. It emphasizes the growing importance of happiness as a metric for national success and governmental objectives. The report is a collaborative effort involving various organizations and is edited by prominent researchers in the field. The website also offers information about the report's background, methodology, and ways to explore the data further. We present this resource as an Example Project.

Keywords:  World happiness   Global data   Data analysis   Well-being data   Data advocacy