Towards categorizing ethical questions in data literacy : Results of a focus groups study at the NFDI4Ing conference 2022

Data Literacy is crucial for a sustainable engineering education. In aiming to find solutions to solve future challenges, mechanical engineering has started to integrate data literacy into the higher education curriculum. However, in current frameworks ethics are seen as a side topic or are equated to data privacy issues. Since literacy aims to empower people to make informed decisions based on their or other data, the development of critical reflection and discussion on ethics is central for data literacy. Those frameworks who do address ethics often remain general in their examples. In our contribution, we aim to add ethical questions that data scientist face in their work with data. Therefore, we will first summarize current existing data literacy frameworks and their ethics concept. Then, through a focus group study among data literacy experts’ we collect ethical and categorized questions. The study was conducted with 15 experts at the NFDI4Ing Conference 2022. This approach expands examples in ethics for data literacy beyond data privacy towards applied, current and pressing ethical questions.