“Today, my colleague Rahul Bhargava and I are pleased to launch the Data Culture Project. This is the latest evolution of our DataBasic.io work, now focused on helping organizations build a data culture in creative, hands-on ways. We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data? The Data Culture Project is a totally free and open source, remixable, hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization or community. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other. For those of you teaching data journalism, some of these activities and videos might be fun to use in the introductory period to help introduce new learners to concepts like quantitative text analysis, exploratory data visualization and more. Over the past year, we piloted the Data Culture Project with 25 organizations from around the world ranging from nonprofits to libraries to newsrooms. Check it out at http://datacultureproject.org, and you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/engagement-lab-emerson-college/launching-the-data-culture-project-59076c514c04.”
Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College. Faculty Director, Emerson Engagement Lab. Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media