Data Literacy and Citizenship

This chapter explores the challenges that emerge from a narrow understanding of the principles underpinning Big data, framed in the context of the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics. This study considers the materiality of computerised data and examines how notions of data access, data sampling, data sense-making and data collection are nowadays contested by datafied public and private bodies, hindering the capacity of citizens to effectively understand and make better use of the data they generate or engage with. The study offers insights from secondary and documentary research and its results suggest that understanding data in less constraining terms, namely: a) as capable of secondary agency, b) as the vital fluid of societal institutions, c) as gathered or accessed by new data brokers and through new technologies and techniques, and d) as mediated by the constant interplay between public and corporate spheres and philosophies, could greatly enhance the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics in the framework of current efforts to advance data literacy.

Data Literacy and Citizenship

This chapter explores the challenges that emerge from a narrow understanding of the principles underpinning Big data, framed in the context of the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics. This study considers the materiality of computerised data and examines how notions of data access, data sampling, data sense-making and data collection are nowadays contested by datafied public and private bodies, hindering the capacity of citizens to effectively understand and make better use of the data they generate or engage with. The study offers insights from secondary and documentary research and its results suggest that understanding data in less constraining terms, namely: a) as capable of secondary agency, b) as the vital fluid of societal institutions, c) as gathered or accessed by new data brokers and through new technologies and techniques, and d) as mediated by the constant interplay between public and corporate spheres and philosophies, could greatly enhance the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics in the framework of current efforts to advance data literacy.

The Domestication of Water

This paper examines some of the key ways in which water is mediated by technology and human artifacts. I show how the modes in which we conceive and experience this vital fluid are affected deeply by the techniques and instruments we use to interact with it. I argue that a notion of the domestication of water enables us to better grasp our relations with the environment given that vast volumes of water are now neither completely natural nor artificial in the conventional senses of the terms. Instead, water is often filtered through an expansive technological network that not merely changes its flows and phenomenal forms but greatly alters or multiplies its meanings. As examples of this process, I investigate the practical engagement with water by the first Western philosopher; the construction of several large hydrological projects; efforts at river management in the aesthetic landscape; and the emergence of bottled water.