The 13th International ACM Conference on Web Science in 2021 (WebSci’21) is an interdisciplinary conference where a multitude of research disciplines converge with the purpose of creating a greater insight into a complex global Web than the sum of their individual parts.

2nd Data Literacy Workshop

Data increasingly enters and affects the lives of citizens through the presence of algorithms, machine learning and the potential for AI. As such, citizenship needs to have a clear understanding of such a valuable resource. This is what we call Data Literacy. Within the umbrella of the DEDALUS project and the ACM’s Websci21 Conference, this workshop aims to investigate the potential for coherent multidisciplinary research into what data literacy means for society as a whole, why it matters, and how it might be facilitated.

In this workshop, we will be addressing questions such as:

• What do we mean by data literacy? Is there one kind of data literacy or many? What skills, knowledge and attitudes does it include? How does it relate to other types of literacy (digital, numerical, statistical and linguistic)?
• Why do we need data literacy? What are the social, political, economic, technical issues it can address?
• How should it be achieved? Is it best done through education, training, or behaviour change or does it require better tools and support? What are the pros and cons of national training schemes such as those in Finland and The Netherlands? What are the alternatives? What should private and public sector organisations do about data literacy? How should data literacy participate in education and research?
• How does data literacy interplay with ethical guidance? Does improved data literacy without associated ethical education carry risks?
• How data literate should we be? Is there a basic level of ‘data literacy’ everyone in society should meet?

It is our aim to:

• Document the current state of research in this area;
• Identify an emergent research agenda that begins to include the data literacy required for living with AI;
• Provide an opportunity for the community of people interested in research in this area that we began to build with the first data literacy workshop with an opportunity to re-engage;
• Welcome new researchers into the data literacy community.

We plan to invite speakers from across a range of data literacy initiatives, with a predominance of the DEDALUS and DATALIT Erasmus+ projects, which address the Data Literacy skills gap in Europe. The invited speakers are among the workshop organizers listed below.

Workshop organizers:

• Manuel León, University of Southampton, UK (main contact) https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuel-le%C3%B3n-urrutia-4210a966/
• Johanna Walker, University of Southampton, UK This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/jcw2g13
• Rob Brennan, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University https://www.computing.dcu.ie/~rbrennan/
• Louise Mullagh, Lancaster University Imaginationlancaster.ac.uk
• Davide Taibi, National Research Center of Italy https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Davide-Taibi-2
• Andrea Nelson Mauro, Dataninja https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonmau/?originalSubdomain=it
• Laima Urbisene, Vilnius University https://www.linkedin.com/in/laimaurbsiene/?originalSubdomain=lt
• Uglijesa Marjanovic, University of Novi Sad https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-ugljesa-marjanovic-mba-4a506316/?originalSubdomain=rs
• Tim Scholze, University Duisbourg Essen https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-scholze-2184a669/?originalSubdomain=de