In 2016, Purdue Libraries launched the Biomedical Big Data Hacking for Civic Health Awareness Project, an initiative focused on teaching research data management competencies and encouraging participants interested in working with big biomedical data to compete in extracurricular, library-sponsored healthcare hackathons and similar biomedical data challenges. Healthcare hackathons are live or virtual competitive events that rely on a multidisciplinary approach to accelerate the innovation of medical solutions and improve healthcare technology design. The project succeeded in its goal of creating biomedical data hacking challenges that attracted a diverse range of participants, including students in health sciences disciplines, early career health professionals, and members of the public. Across the project's challenges, 28% of participants have been either health professionals or students majoring in health sciences disciplines, 38% of attendees have been women, and 46% have been members of a racial minority group.
In the next phase of this project, we seek to design and launch a course that encourages an interdisciplinary group of students to apply critical pedagogy to big biomedical data, considering questions such as ‘who collects biomedical data?’; ‘where does biomedical data come from?’; ‘what challenges are associated with combining, formatting, storing, and analyzing big biomedical data from different systems?’; ‘who controls and owns biomedical data?’; and ‘what privacy concerns need to be addressed by health professionals using data from patient health records and hospital information systems?’ The researchers hypothesize that a focus on these issues will allow for robust discussions around algorithmic bias, informed refusal, and similar social justice issues.
In this paper presentation, we hope to engage the audience in a discussion around critical data studies and critical librarianship and seek audience feedback on what a course focused on crit lib and critical data science might look like.
