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This project entails the topic of data literacy – a social practice that addresses the understanding and informed use of data. The goal is to make a connection between these two and create a workshop that will empower people to start using data to push social change.
Kuba will conduct desk research on data activism projects to understand and describe their types and the reasons, goals, and ways of running them. The focus will be on the existing proposals for organizing data activism projects in Poland and around the world. It is also a place to analyze the motivations behind data activism projects, the stated goals, and ways of carrying them out based on the analysis of the content publicly available on the websites of these projects.
To better understand what constitutes data literacy, Kuba will further conduct interviews with data activists. Their projects span across a plethora of topics: from ecological activism, to social activism that aims at visualising how homophobic law influences lives of citizens (i.e., Atlas of Hate).
The goal is to shed light on new trends in the phenomenon of data activism.
The goal is to shed light on new trends in the phenomenon of data activism, deepen knowledge of existing data activism projects, including those related to emancipation and/or resistance. This part of the project will help shape the project activities by including workshops for the people who would like to engage in data activism but do not know where to start. They also aim at providing reluctant activists, who are afraid of data, with training sets and materials that address the stereotype of “mathiness” of data sets and empowers them to take action.
The last part of the project, which builds upon the first two parts, is to collaborate with selected data activists and create a workshop that addresses the topic of data literacy. It will be focused not only on technical and practical tasks, but will also aim to break the stereotype of analyses as hard to make.
The main audience of these training sessions will be people who don’t consider themselves data literate, either because they think it’s hard to become or because they don’t see a point in learning it. In the first iteration of the project, at least 20 people from Poland will be reached, with a possibility to scale the project internationally.
Updated November 2022
