Veranstaltungsprogramm

As we navigate an increasingly data-driven world, teaching and training in research data management (RDM) is essential for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reuseable) data usage and supply. To have the ability to effectively manage and utilize data, education in data literacy should start from the very beginning. Inspired by this increasing importance of data competencies, members of several NFDI (National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany) Consortia as well as of the NFDI-Section Training & Education assembled to establish a platform for data literacy. The formed initiative DALIA (DAta LIteracy Alliance) is developing this platform as a user-centered knowledge graph based on semantic web technology. These efforts contribute to DALIA’s paradigm: “Data literacy for all from the very beginning!”

DALIA promotes learning and teaching of data literacy through the curated provision of open teaching and learning content to empower everyone to collect, analyze, critically evaluate and use data in a FAIR way. The knowledge base can only be successful – i.e., accepted – if quality-assessed informational, teaching, and learning materials are available and if these materials are offered and recommended according to the personal needs of the users. Therefore, the DALIA platform is designed as a single point of entry, which makes suggestions for materials according to individual needs in a heterogeneous and constantly growing landscape of informational, teaching, and learning materials. The users are individuals from academic and adjacent fields, who have different roles (researchers, teachers, learners), various career and RDM experience levels, and come from different scientific disciplines. As a result, the knowledge base will assist users with their questions on the usage (data science) and provision of FAIR data, refer to appropriate teaching and learning materials, and suggest learning paths and best practice documents.

The presentation will introduce the scientific infrastructure project DALIA and demonstrate the use of the DALIA platform. It will highlight how DALIA indexes, links, and visualizes existing offers, as a wide range of data literacy materials and tools are already available. Attendees will learn how to contribute their materials, how to work with the platform, and how to find materials among those already implemented to re-use for their own training as well as teaching purposes. Consequently, DALIA aims to act as a reservoir for data literacy training resources for the NFDI, federal RDM initiatives, data competence centers and beyond in order to establish a data culture in the academic environment.

The scientific landscape is continually shifting towards increasing amounts of data, demanding a greater investment of (time-) resources into the management of these data. As a result, data literacy is a key element of research, which is becoming more and more important for researchers from all domains. Additionally, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and collaborative approaches are becoming more essential now than ever before. Hence, we believe the concept and activities of the Rhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy to be highly relevant to the topic and audience of this year’s “E-Science Tage” conference.

The Rhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy is an initiative funded by the German Federal ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union. We are a consortium of nine institutions in the Rhine-Ruhr area including universities, research institutions, and universities of applied science. The overarching goal of the DKZ.2R is to reduce data-related hurdles in research and support holistic, methodological data literacy in the areas of research data management, artificial intelligence, machine learning, high performance computing, and data science. The DKZ.2R has a strong interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary focus, and is a regional center focused primarily, but not exclusively on partners and participants in the Rhine-Ruhr area.

Our main objective is to promote a holistic methodological data literacy and offer support for researchers to break through data related hurdles in order to find cross-domain solutions and synergies. The regional focus of the DKZ.2R allows us to offer in-depth support, making resources more generally available and facilitating connections between researchers and research groups across institutions and domains. With a more flexible approach such as curating relevant and existing trainings and seminars, identifying gaps in those resources, and creating new offers in the form of (online) courses and seminars, we aim at supporting data literacy for researchers from all over Germany while ensuring high quality in all of our offerings. This combination of in-depth and more general long- and short-term solutions allows us to promote data literacy, research data management, and machine learning skills (depending on the researcher’s needs) while constantly adapting to the changing challenges in the scientific landscape.