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INFO: Virtual lectures series: Digital Humanities – Theorie und Methodik “Data Literacy and Digital Humanities”
The digital universe is growing very fast and the amount of information contained in data is exploding. The mining of these data has ethical, social, and political consequences. In order to think through these consequences a new kind of literacy is needed, which could also be called ‘data literacy’ if we define it according to Chantel Ridsdale as “the ability to collect, manage, evaluate, and apply data in a critical manner”.
But how should we teach data literacy in the Humanities?
The Digital Humanities are characterised by a cross-disciplinary and collaborative nature, by project orientation, hands-on practices and the use of cultural heritage data, and by the aim to integrate and create domain-specific knowledge with computational methods and tools while reflecting their application and use critically. As such Digital Humanities would seem to offer everything that students need to become not only literate in their specific Humanities field, but to acquire at the same time data literacy and skills like problem solving, computational and critical thinking.
As the data which play a role in Digital Humanities are themselves multiform and comprise among other types visual, audio, geospatial, temporal, and statistical data, we can even say that by studying Digital Humanities students become meta- or transliterate and thus able to employ their knowledge, competencies and skills in very diverse social and professional domains.
In order to support the claim that doing Digital Humanities involves becoming (meta- / trans-) data literate and to illustrate the acquisition of data literacy in diverse Humanities-specific courses offered at different levels of university education, we have brought together an international group of specialists.