In the production of knowledge, data, together with the continuous application of methods of inquiry, constitutes the basis for humans to construct new concepts and revise existing ones. Data includes, but is not limited to, facts and statistics and can rather be more accurately defined as any kind of information with the potential of being systematized and interpreted to become a component of personal and/or shared knowledge, eventually leading to real-life decision making. Thereby, amidst a world overdriven by monetary gain and capitalist power dynamics, the expeditious availability of more data raises ethical issues related to data management and data sharing practices and leads me to consider the following knowledge questions: “To what …show more content…
Accordingly, not all evidence in the arts can be regarded as objective: data, within this area of knowledge, can be considered to encompass the interactions of an audience with an artwork. From the perspective of the audience, more data enhances the development of coherent interpretations. For example, while reading The Great Gatsby for my IB English language and literature course, I built a system of meaning derived from the set of words in the text. Under a formalist approach, my interpretation was based on my analysis of form and literary devices. Through close reading, I was able to identify Nick Carraway as the novel’s first person frame narrator and describe how the geographical distribution of the setting (i.e. East Egg and West Egg) parallels the conflict between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy. Thereafter, I adopted a historical-biographical criticism. By recalling facts about the Roaring Twenties and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life after his participation in World War I, I understood the novel’s aesthetic characteristics on a wider context and was able to justify my conclusion that The Great Gatsby embodies a commentary on the degradation of an increasingly consumerist and liberal American society during the post-war decade of the 1920s. In turn, the knowledge I produced from my interactions with the novel under distinct paradigms influenced my response as a teenager: The Great Gatsby offers me an insight into authenticity and our current culture of