What would “data literature” look like?
My eldest daughter is now in secondary school and, while she enjoys and is good at Maths, what she really loves studying is History and English. Watching the critical thinking and analysis skills that she is learning and using for those subjects, I have started to wonder if we should be approaching data literacy from a different angle.
The need for children and adults to be equipped with data skills is well recognised. The Nesta paper Analytic Britain: Securing the Right Skills for the Data-Driven Economy contains some recommendations, for example. However, much of this work focuses on the development of what I would frame as data science skills: the basic skills like the ability to clean data, analyse it, display it in graphs and maps, and the more advanced skills of machine learning and interactive visualisations. Data literacy becomes equated with the ability to do things with data.
