In 2007, film critic Kevin B. Lee began publishing “video essays,” which he described as videos that “take footage from films and reconfigure them using editing, text, graphics and voiceover to reveal startling observations and insights, visualizing them in ways that text criticism can’t,”1 on his blog Also Like Life. When I started working at the University of Maryland’s Nonprint Media Services Library (now Library Media Services) in 2013, I knew I wanted to incorporate this technique into our instructional efforts. Traditionally, NPMS’s instruction had focused on finding audiovisual materials; our new objective was to teach students how to create something new from the items in our collection.
For the benefit of students, employers, and society, data literacy must be recognized as a necessary civic skill (Swan et al., 2009). This recognition should come from all levels of government, and from post-secondary institutions. There needs to be agreement on what
elements of data literacy are necessary in an undergraduate core curriculum, in order to provide a consistent foundational education for those entering an increasingly data-dependent workforce.
Andrea Rassell, RMIT University As an experimental video-maker working at scales smaller than molecules, I surround myself in a variety…