What is this “data literacy” anyway?

This question can hardly be answered in one sentence.
In English, we speak of “data literacy”, i.e. the ability to read and write data.
If the alphabet enables us to read and write , first letters, then words, and finally texts, data literacy enables us to collect, manage, evaluate and analyze data and make decisions based on it.

And what do we mean by “data”?

The short answer to this is: everything.
All information – about people, points in time, content, compositions, measured values – all information can be processed as data.
It is not for nothing that electronic data processing is now called “informatics”.

And because objects, for example in natural history collections, also contain a wealth of information, you could also understand them as “analog” data – at least that’s how my colleague Martin Stricker from our sister project SoDa once put it.
Depending on the question or task at hand, this or that unstructured information bound up in the object has always been extracted, measured, described and documented – for example on index cards.

Strictly speaking, objects are in fact a whole collection of data – each object has many different properties such as name, size, weight, material, density, temperature…
And it is linked to other information, e.g. the location, time of discovery, finder, conservation methods, etc. These all end up together on an index card (or in a table row) forming a data record.

Every one of us who has ever written a shopping list or filled out a form has created a data set and has basic data skills: we know our ABCs and can “read” data. But as in school, there is still a long way to go from “being able to read words” to “analyzing poems”…
… and on this path we at WiNoDa are happy to accompany you!