Data Mining for Information Literacy

This paper argues for extending the scope of applying data mining towards making it a means to help people better understand, reflect and influence the information and information-producing and -consuming activities that they are surrounded by in today’s knowledge societies. Data mining is thereby seen as a means to furthering information literacy and specifically critical literacy. We discuss and extend classical definitions of these two constructs and derive critical data literacy and privacy literacy as two essential new key sub-competences. We describe an analysis framework for concrete efforts to use data mining in this way, structuring by techniques and objects and characterising by how principles of successful learning are supported. We then analyse a number of examples of current Web-based tools within this framework, investigating how they can further critical data literacy and privacy literacy. We conclude with an outlook on next steps in the proposed new field of Data Mining for Information Literacy.