From Awareness to Action: Engaging Introductory Statistics Students in Anti-Racist Data Art

How can we engage undergraduate statistics students in current conversations around race and racism? How can we help to promote a deeper understanding of how statistics and data science can be used to perpetuate or challenge social inequities? In this presentation, I'll describe the process I undertook with a small group of undergraduate students during an 8-week summer program to create a data art collection to raise awareness of racial disparities in obstetrics & gynecology health care. We developed a systematic protocol for the review, screened articles, reviewed eligible articles, and then created data art based on the data collected during the review. Along the way, we thought critically about our privilege hazards, examined the limits of objectivity in the statistical process, discussed how race and racism are commonly handled in statistical analyses in major medical journals, and examined many examples of data art to help inform and inspire our own data "visceralizations". We created a publicly available website with our data art – and the data collected – to raise awareness and make this research accessible to the community.

data art

racial disparities

obstetrics & gynecology

undergraduate

introductory statistics

racism 

Beginner

Education

Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) 2023