From Information Literacy to Data Literacy. / From Information Literacy to Data Literacy.: How to progressively introduce students to research data? From search to research

Research data are becoming of interest also for students, after years spent in doing Information literacy courses, we started to introduce data literacy in courses offered by the Library, by means of a practical example or text analysis practices done on Jstor Archive.Jstor Archive is an ancient database enabling longitudinal research (very long time-series), it is organized in a way that makes information retrieval simple and possible (indexes, quotation search, keywords, …). Since the last five years, Jstor developers have also been proposing new services (Text analyser and Data for research, Text analyses tools organised in Phyton Notebooks, …) connected to Archive contents. The Jstor Labs’ Platform Constellate is a tool in which open educational materials are offered for free to introduce some text analysis techniques on Jstor Archive and more.Text analysis connects words to numbers and vice-versa. The data gathered consists of lexicometric measures used to do “distant reading” on texts contained in corpora or to have an idea of entire platforms contents. Jstor Archive is particularly useful for introducing humanists to data, as for humanists’ data are still something not tangible, metadata and distant reading techniques can help to contextualize data.The Constellate’s features allow explaining to students some data literacy and how to do a search by means of data, or how to build, clean and manage a dataset, how to deposit it to preserve and retrieve it, all activities related to data science, or the “data cycle”.The aim is to make students aware of data and to give them a first example of how they can use data, starting from bibliographic one (metadata), to do their own search and research.We didn’t subscribe to the full service, we propose to students to use the free trier of the Constellate service, as the aim is to introduce to text analysis by open education material, to make aware about data and finally to show new ways to do information retrieval.