Thread by @brobertzadeh

I’ve been wanting to say this out loud for a while…
“ᴅᴀᴛᴀ ʟɪᴛᴇʀᴀᴄʏ” just doesn’t sit right with me.
I think I'd rather identify as data curious | critical | confident than data literate. Want to know why?
🧵a thread 🧵 1/8

Literate can mean:
1. having knowledge or competency in a specified area.
2. being able to read or write.
So riddle me this: do you need to be literate to be literate? 2/8

In the spirit of #datafeminism and challenging power, literacy is exclusive. It places reading and writing above orality. The OECD defines six levels of literacy, but ultimately it’s a binary of either being literate (have) or not (have not). 3/8

This is the 2014 definition of “data literacy” from Wikipedia (@Wikimedia and @waybackmachine ftw). In 2015 @kanarinka first defined data literacy as the ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data, but in 2017 proposed the term “creative data literacy”. 4/8

'Creative data literacy’ b/c @kanarinka says "non-technical learners may need pathways towards data which do not come from technical fields”.

‘Creative’ *almost* saves it, but I've witnessed the sleep-inducing properties of the words 'data literacy' and it's not pretty
5/8

Data is SO exciting. And guess what. You can 'read', work with, analyse and argue with data, without ever touching a spreadsheet. Don’t believe me?
Watch this short video about a community creating data together in Dandora 6/8

So can I make a case for shifting from d̶a̶t̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶t̶e̶r̶a̶c̶y̶ to data confidence? A data confident person is:
❇︎ data curious ❇︎ (exploring | investigating)
❇︎ data critical ❇︎ (interpreting | evaluating)
❇︎ data creative ❇︎ (experimenting | communicating) 7/8

Last but not least, a summary in emojis. I’ve been 🤔 about #dataliteracy and it makes me feel a bit 🤢. 🙏 could we use #dataconfidence instead❓ I went down many 🐇🕳️ and I could be opening a 🥫 of 🐛, but I want to 🔎 at 🧮 in a more 🎨 way. I 💌 you 📊. Time for 🛌. 8/8

Extra for experts pt 1! If you’ve made it this far you might be interested in: this #datavalues Fireside chat I did with @janetlmclaren a couple of months ago

Extra for experts pt 2! If you’ve made it this far you might be interested in: My interview with #demokratidatapodden start at 1.40 unless you speak Swedish open.spotify.com/episode/5kuZ8Q…