1. What is Data Literacy?

Introduction
For much of human history, most people lacked the ability to read or write. Therefore,
virtually all of the writing that remains from ancient civilizations was produced by a tiny
minority of highly educated scribes (people who specialized in reading and writing).
Scribes were considered very important people in the society of the time. There were even
statues made of them! Here’s a statuette of a famous Egyptian scribe from 3,500 years ago.
This man was called Minnakht, and you can see him reading hieroglyphs from the papyrus
on his lap:

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and you have a world in which 86% of all people
aged 15 and above know how to read and write in their native language. The figure is even
higher (nearly 100%) in most developed countries. Imagine if we had to hire a scribe in
order to write an email, make a grocery shopping list, or understand TV ads!
2. Data Literacy
Data literacy is becoming the new literacy. Increases in computer processing and storage
power are adding to the value of data, and those who know how to work with data are the
new scribes. Today, understanding how to interpret data is becoming as important as
traditional literacy.
Not many people can reliably interpret a bar chart, a line chart, or a frequency table, yet
being able to do so would make them much more attuned to the world around them. People
with data literacy skills can find better jobs, make better health decisions, plan their
financial lives more judiciously, and be more informed citizens. Many companies hire
highly skilled data analysts and data scientists to help them make sense of all the data they
routinely gather, but sometimes these people struggle to make the wider organization
understand what they do and how the insights they produce can be useful for the business.
In some sense, data workers are modern scribes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Although data scientists and analysts are still necessary, the
modern economy demands people who are confident about their data skills and can help
disseminate and take action on data-derived knowledge across their organizations. The
good news is that just as we learned how to read and write in our native human languages
in school, we can also learn how to read and write in the language of data. That is what this
program is all about!
3. More Data Literacy
But what is data literacy? We define it as the ability to read, write, translate, and think about data

Let’s break down what we mean by this.

Reading data
In order to become proficient at reading data, you need to develop at least two fundamental skills:

1. Recognizing the symbols used to represent data. When reading text, we need to recognize
letters and words - in data, we need to understand what each chart type, table, statistic, etc.,
means.
2. Understanding the relationships between those symbols so that they can be connected to
create coherent narratives or stories (just like how words are strung together to create
articles and books).

In that sense, data analyses are like stories that need to be read correctly to be fully
understood, similar to when you read a story in the news. In a proper data analysis, you will
have charts, tables, and statistical quantities that, when considered together, can effectively
answer the questions that the analyst needs to answer. Below are some examples of
dashboards (organized aesthetic pages consisting of charts, tables, and statistical
quantities). Don’t worry if you don’t understand them yet - by the end of this program, you
will be reading (and creating!) beautiful, professional dashboards like the ones on the
following pages.
4. IT Dashboard
IT Dashboard
Dashboards are powerful tools for visualizing data and tracking workflows efficiently. This Tableau
Public dashboard leverages bar charts and line graphs to present IT cases categorized by product,
origin, and time. This visualization enables us to quickly identify when the highest number of IT
cases occurred, which case types are most frequent, and the most common case origins. By
analyzing this data, we can streamline IT case management by targeting both the most and least
common sources of IT cases.

Click here for the live dashboard.

Discussion 1

1. From the “Case Overview” in the Tech Support section of the dashboard, which week had
the highest number of cases?
2. What was the highest Case Origin and how many cases did it have in total?
3. Navigate to the "Open Case Workbench". What differences do you notice about this and the
"Case Overview"? What additional information is being conveyed?
5. Airline Dashboard
Airline Departures Dashboard
What information is used to determine flight prices? While numerous factors influence pricing,
supply and demand play a central role. This dashboard leverages flight schedule data to visualize
key analytics for departures across various airlines. By examining this data, we can easily compare
shifts in flight demand between 2020 and 2021, enabling us to make informed decisions about flight
availability and pricing strategies.

Click here for the Airline Departures Dashboard.

In January (Month 1), what was the % Change in Domestic Departing flights?

-41.9%

81,670K

-43.9%
6. NASA Dashboard
NASA’s Earth Observation Dashboard
Satellite imagery has become a very important source of data for scientists in the last decades, and
its huge potential for many applications is still only starting to be realized. One institution that has
produced a large number of satellite images over the years is NASA (you can view some of them
here). What is even more interesting is that NASA has a publicly accessible dashboard - the Earth
Observing (EO) Dashboard - that aggregates data from multiple sources and combines them with its
own satellite data to create amazing analyses. The below image shows the global map of CO 2 air
pollution from NASA’s EO Dashboard:

Discussion 2

1. On the map, the redder the area, the higher the concentration of CO 2, and the bluer
the area, the lower the concentration. White areas have CO 2 concentrations that are
intermediate. Can you detect any interesting patterns just by looking at the map?
7. US Census Bureau Data
U.S. Census Bureau statistical profiles
The U.S. Census Bureau is the government body in charge of providing data about the nation’s
people and economy. It routinely conducts surveys and occasional censuses (typically every ten
years) to get snapshots of many important demographic and economic variables that policymakers
can use to make informed decisions. There are many ways to consult the U.S. Census Bureau data,
but one of the most popular is via its interactive statistical profiles. Click on the link below the
image to access the United States’ statistical profile. This is a dashboard that contains figures and
charts created with data from surveys conducted in 2012, 2016, and 2019:

Live Census Data Page

Discussion 3
1. Read the figures just below the map at the top of the profile. Do you find them surprising?
Why?
2. There is a treasure trove of additional information in this profile. Scroll down and read the
sub-headers to get a sense of all the categories on this dashboard that have data.
3. If you scroll all the way down, you will find links to state profiles. Choose a state and
explore it. What interesting facts did you find?
8. Tools: Excel
Once you become familiar with the art of reading data and interpreting dashboards, you can begin
learning how those dashboards and analyses are created. Here is a sneak peek of some of the tools
that you will be using to write data in the coming weeks. You can think of them as your data pen
and paper.

Excel
Many data analyses start with an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the key factors which make Excel
such a useful tool are:

 It is easy to learn
 It is very intuitive, and the user interface just makes sense
 You can calculate some fairly sophisticated data quantities relatively easily
 Many data analytics tools can work directly with Excel files

One of the most helpful things about Excel is that you can actually look at your dataset as soon as
you open it.

All of the data in this dataset is immediately visible by navigating the Excel user interface. This is
NOT the case with most other data tools.
9. Tools: Dashboards
Looker Studio & Tableau
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) and Tableau are dashboarding tools we will discuss
in this program. Some reasons for this are ease of use, wide range of visualization options, and
highly customizable aesthetics. Whenever you stumble upon a beautiful dashboard on the Internet,
there is a good chance that it was made using Looker Studio or a commercial dashboarding tool
(e.g., Tableau, Power BI).

Click here to go to Looker Studio’s Public gallery.

Discussion 4

Pick a dashboard that catches your eye. Name it and describe it. What made you choose it?
10. Tools: Python
SQL and Python
Some complex tasks can be difficult to accomplish using Excel alone. In those cases, you can use
other tools like SQL and Python. SQL (Structured Query Language) is a programming language
that uses basic English words to search for or calculate specific things using your available datasets.
To give you an idea of what working with SQL looks like, we have recorded a GIF of a data
scientist querying a more extensive database consisting of hundreds of thousands of data points:

Larger databases like this one quickly become impractical to manage using Excel.
Python is another tool that lets you perform very complex analyses of your data. Many AI
(artificial intelligence) applications, like self-driving cars or stock market prediction
models, are developed using Python. Although most of this program will focus on teaching
you Excel and dashboarding, we will also introduce you to SQL and show you a little of
what Python can do.

What tool is primarily used for working with spreadsheets but not databases?

Python
Excel
SQL
11. Working with Data
Translating your data

As you progress as a data professional, you will find that not everyone around you will be as data-
savvy as you. In many situations, you will be asked to take data analyses and their associated charts,
graphs, tables, and/or numbers and explain them to a non-technical audience. A typical scenario
would be in a business meeting, in which you’d have to present and explain the significance of
metrics to stakeholders who are not very familiar with data. Your analyses may seem like Egyptian
hieroglyphs to them, so you will be expected to translate! We will teach you in later cases how to do
this effectively.

Discussion 5
Swedish scholar Hans Rosling was renowned for his excellent skills as a data translator. Watch the
first 5 minutes of this lecture he delivered back in 2006 (the video will open in a new tab).

Hans Rosling TED talk

What did you find interesting or noteworthy in the talk?

12. Thinking About Data
Thinking about data
Data literacy is about reading, writing, and translating data with a purpose. That purpose is usually
made explicit in the form of a research question or business question. Coming up with great
questions that are feasible and pertinent with the aim to produce actionable insights is probably the
most important skill you will need to develop to truly become data literate - i.e., the art of thinking
about data.

Thinking about data involves:

 Defining a good research or business question

 Determining what data needs to be gathered in order to answer the question
 Avoiding common pitfalls when interpreting statistical quantities
 Being aware of what can and can’t be inferred from a limited amount of data points
13. Knowledge Check
This knowledge check is an opportunity for you to be sure you understand these key
concepts.

1. Being able to produce a chart is an example of:

Translating data
Writing data
Thinking about data
Reading data

2. Making out the meaning of a chart and understanding its part in a narrative is an
example of:

Translating data
Reading data
Thinking about data
Writing data

3. Understanding how your analysis impacts others is an example of:

Translating data
Thinking about data
Reading data
Writing data

4. Explaining your analysis is an example of:

Thinking about data

Translating data
Reading data
Writing data
14. Conclusions & Takeaways
Data literacy is one of the most important skills to have in the 21st century. Data-literate people can
make better financial decisions, are more employable, and are generally more informed citizens. We
can group data literacy skills into four main pillars:

1. Reading data - being able to read data representations such as charts, tables, and statistical
figures, which not only involves understanding what they mean by themselves but also
understanding how they make up part of a coherent narrative.
2. Writing data - being able to produce charts, tables, statistical quantities, and dashboards for
other people to read.
3. Translating data - communicating data analyses to non-technical audiences.
4. Thinking about data - understanding how your analyses relate to the business questions
that matter to your stakeholders.

You will encounter many interesting concepts and tools along your journey as a data professional.
Some of them will be challenging, but we are all here to help you and make sure you learn as much
as possible and enjoy the journey!

Attribution
Scribe Statue of Min-nakht, Walters Art Museum, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Unported