Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute

In the Anthropocene statistics, data science, and mathematical models have become a perversion of reality that society has largely chosen to ignore and is embraced as a great savior because people often view numbers as objective purveyors of truth. However, numbers do not interpret themselves, they do not tell their own story; people do that in all their subjective glory. In this chapter, I start by making connections between the Anthropocene and the disciplines of statistics and data science specifically through the context of spatial data. From this discussion I focus on two main points, which I connect to education. The first is that there is a dialectic tension involved in spatial data enquiry between creating new realities using spatial data and using spatial data to make sense of our reality. The second point is that people can choose how to investigate and use spatial data based on their ethics. I believe students should have opportunities to investigate and use spatial statistics through a spatial justice lens both to learn about the world around them and to shape the world around them.