Emancipatory Data Literacy and the Value of Trust

Data literacy has been formulated as a future skill for the 21st century. While data literacy is often thought as an individualized competence which tends to responsibilize the individual, this paper suggests an idea of emancipatory data literacy as a structural competence and critical attitude towards data and data-driven arguments. This attitude includes a mastery of the tools to trust in data on a well-grounded manner and is conceptualized with a special focus on affect, which makes data literacy a genuinely relational phenomenon. As an epistemological practice data literacy is a genuine part of what it means to talk about or with science. Since data is often understood as one of the major indicators for objectivity, data literacy helps to trust in scientific arguments and in the same way know limits and conditionality of objectivity.