Data Fluencies – Online-Workshop
What are data fluencies?
Data fluencies combine analytical techniques from arts and humanities with tools from data science to fluidly understand and engage our data-filled world in all their complexities and contradictions. Moving beyond data literacy, with its emphasis on thinking within the boundaries of the world as given, data fluencies start by realizing that the world our technologies anticipate is not the only possibility, and instead encourage us to interject and resist the tacit and explicit norms embedded in data work. They embrace creative and imaginative capabilities as a means to grapple with the complexities of data systems and to rewrite the scripts we’re given.
What is the Data Fluencies project?
Since 2022, the Digital Democracies Institute (DDI) based at Simon Fraser University (SFU) has spearheaded the Mellon Foundation-funded Data Fluencies research project (https://digitaldemocracies.org/data-fluencies/) under the leadership of Professor Wendy Chun. Project contributors consist of researchers from across the globe who tackle social justice issues pertaining to data including technology developers, media scholars, theatre producers, curators, artists and designers. The project’s aim is to develop tools to identify and resist dangers posed by social media and predatory algorithms and to advance innovative qualitative-quantitative methods for addressing pressing data justice challenges like online polarization, abusive language, discriminatory algorithms, and mis- and disinformation.
What will this workshop entail?
Attendees to this session will be introduced to data fluencies approaches to research through the presentation of a selection of tools and methods developed by the team. This will be followed by a hands-on workshop where participants will be invited to try out one of the tools called Mythical Shadow Animals, which was co-created with a group of teenagers from Vancouver, to explore how data shape their everyday lives.
Registered participants will receive the Zoom link and supplementary material by email.