Authors of Data Literacy, Peter Aiken and Todd Harbour: Data Literacy Lacks Common Definition

(US and Canada) Peter Aiken and Todd Harbour recently launched their third co-authored book, “Data Literacy: Achieving Higher Productivity for Citizens, Knowledge Workers, and Organizations, First Edition”

In conversation with Althea Davis, Managing Partner and Chief Data Officer, Turn Key Technologies, Aiken and Harbour speak about the need for data literacy and the thought process behind their book.

Regarding “Data Illiterate Society,” a chapter in the book, Aiken says that both he and Harbour were frustrated with the approach to data literacy.

“First of all, we were preaching to the choir and that’s very comfortable. The real element of this is a societal one and that's the angle we took in the book. It was Todd who came up with the term ‘perpetual involuntary data donor.’ You are very much like the batteries in the movie The Matrix. Those would be the human beings that were supplying all of the energy for the machines to get their stuff. And it turns out there's an industry currently called surveillance capitalism that is designed to do exactly the same thing,” Aiken says.

Sharing his point of view, Harbour says that the scenario hasn’t changed much. “Like many of the things in the data space, data literacy lacks a common definition. Folks with an engineering background have their definition of a data-literate person. And they're referring to the ability and knowledge of using different tools and technologies to process and exploit data.”

Both Aiken and Harbour arrived at the common understanding that society as a whole needs to have a much better grasp of what's going on.

According to Harbour, stratification of people is happening based on their level of data literacy. Some understand technology, the application of the data, and there are those who don’t. “It's pretty frightening when you look at what's happening behind the scenes. So, we chose this perspective to both raise awareness, maybe a little bit of call to arms, and just put some information and ideas out there,” Harbour notes.

After breaking down the levels of data literacy, the literature review showed that the issue mainly surrounds data professionals trying to talk to other people. And the arguments are about whether one needs five years of statistics to be a data scientist, or 10 years.

“Those are the discussions, and we should absolutely have them, but they simply won't move the needle,” Aiken says. “In order to move the needle, we have to hit the 1.5 billion knowledge workers out there, because that really is the definition of a knowledge worker; all knowledge workers work with data. And if they don't know how to do that, then they become less productive as knowledge workers and more vulnerable as citizens.”

The book includes the sentence, “Your data is someone else's asset.” Elaborating on that, Harbour says that today, anything electric is a candidate to connect to a network and become a source of information.

“And a lot of these things are totally benign. If you want to count the number of pieces of bread that your toaster has made, there's an app for that. Or if you want to monitor your goldfish in your tank, there's an app for that. But when you step back and you look at all of these sources of information in the aggregate, they have value to society. They have value to individuals. Wearable technologies are now describing our behaviors and how we interact with one another. Everything that's valuable is now monitored and metered real-time. And that may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what it is,” Harbour concludes.