It seems ironic that in an era of big data, truth is even more elusive. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, work, and environment, we need to use information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our biases.
We are creating a podcast to create a dialogue around the non-neutrality of data. These discussions rarely happen when people learn quantitative skills, creating a system that reinforces inequity and prioritizes established ways-of-knowing.
At this workshop, we will discuss these ideas with participants and record their perspectives, which will be woven into podcast episodes to help tell the human story of data. Participants should come ready to share ideas about how they turn data into knowledge in their work.
We're creating a website which will serve as a web 'home' for the podcast project, which will allow participants to continue to engage with us, alongside sharing their recorded stories as part of the podcast series.
What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:The goal of the project we're discussing in this workshop is to improve openness, critical information literacy, and dialogue surrounding the non-neutrality of data, and create modular products which allow public educators to easily incorporate these materials into lesson plans, to help create discussions about data non-neutrality in computer science, math and statistics classes.
Our goal with this workshop is to both gain community feedback and ideas about our podcast, and also develop materials to increase the number and diversity of perspectives featured in the podcast.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:I think the discussions should be fairly scalable- if there's a lot, there will more likely be people among the participants who like to speak in front of large groups, and if there's few, it can just be a more intimate conversation. First we will solicit feedback about the idea itself, and then we will use our 'interview questions' to draw out responses- ranging from 'sound bites' to full-on narratives from audience members.
Mozilla Fellow 2015, now an Assistant Prof of Computational Ecology at Kent State U.
I'm a sociologist interested in science, belief, religion, and the secular.
Bridget is an associate professor of science education at Kent State University. Her research focuses on the nature of science, including the human side of science.