Building Data Literacy Suite in the Humanities: A Hands-on Approach

Research and scholarship across different disciplines are rapidly evolving with the advent of big data and advanced analytical and visualization tools. Besides those data-intensive disciplines in science and social science, more and more researchers in the humanities are adopting data-oriented methodologies. Understandably, scholars in the humanities have also raised their expectations on their students' data literacy and processing skills. This project builds upon the Information Wanted, an online historical database collected by Ruth-Ann Harris at Boston College's History Department, which provides a comprehensive archive of historical advertisements between 1831 and 1920 from the Piolet, a Boston-based newspaper. These advertisements were posted by early Irish immigrants (and others) looking for their lost friends and relatives. Given that these advertisements also contain information regarding the subjects' occupations, origins, and departure/arrival ports, this dataset offers a unique social and economic snapshot of the early Irish immigrants. Revolving around the ACRL information literacy standards, our plan is to utilize this unique dataset as a platform to develop a data literary suite that incorporates hands-on data skill learning for advanced undergraduate and entry-level graduate students across various majors in the humanities. Specifically, the project seeks to help students achieve the following objectives: 1. Identify the nature and extent of information needs, e.g., identify the archive data appropriate for the research topics; 2. Access data efficiently, e.g., consult disciplinary and interdisciplinary databases with an understanding of the data formats and the involved data extraction skills; 3. Evaluate data critically, e.g., develop knowledge of evaluating the quality and relevance of the collected data; 4. Prepare data for further statistical analysis, e.g., develop data processing skills in text recognition, spreadsheets, and visualization tools; 5. Understand the legal, social and ethical issues of data usage, i.e., introduce students to knowledge and skills of managing, preserving and re-using textual data