Love Data Week is an international celebration of all things data, scheduled annually in the week of Valentine’s Day. Its aim is to engage community and increase awareness with events that highlight the prominence, value, and appropriate handling of data in our lives and research.
International Love Data Week events are promoted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which maintains a list of worldwide events at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/cms/4544.
For Love Data Week 2023, libraries at SFU, UBC, UNBC, and UVic are collaborating to offer a series of talks and workshops. All events will be hosted online via Zoom and registration is open to everyone. We look forward to seeing you soon!
Monday, February 13th, 2023, 2:00-3:00pm
Steps, Tools, & Resources for Promoting Reproducibility / Stephen Lindsay, Monique Grenier (UVic)
Researchers across disciplines have called for reproducible research as an attainable minimum standard for assessing the value of scholarly claims, particularly when full independent replication of a study is not feasible. Making your research more transparent and reproducible pays off and is explicitly in the self-interest of every ambitious, career-oriented researcher. This session will illustrate steps, tools, and resources for promoting reproducibility and transparency in research.
Stephen Lindsay is a cognitive psychologist at UVic with a PhD from Princeton University whose research explores human memory.
Monique Grenier is the Science and Research Data Literacy Librarian at UVic Libraries.
Tuesday, February 14th, 2023, 10:00-11:00am
Accessing modern and historical census data / Elizabeth Nash (Statistics Canada)
Are you interested in learning how to access modern and historic census data? Join a virtual presentation with the Statistics Canada Library as we learn about the tools, webpages, and resources that will help you with your census research. In particular, you’ll learn:
- How to access summary census information from 1665-2021
- How to find historic census returns
- Tips and tricks to find modern data
Elizabeth Nash is a librarian at the Statistics Canada Library in Ottawa, Ontario. She graduated from The University of Western Ontario with a bachelor’s degree in English, and from McGill University with a master’s degree in Information Studies. She enjoys getting lost in the stacks and discovering the stories that historic data can tell.
Tuesday, February 14th, 2023, 12:00-1:00pm
Research Data Centre (RDC) Rundown / Grant Gibson (CRDCN)
An overview of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) and Research Data Centre (RDC) program including some little known or misunderstood tidbits about access to the data, training initiatives & resources, and some of the exciting linked datasets newly available in the RDCs.
Grant Gibson is the Assistant Director – Research & Evaluation at CRDCN. He works within the research portfolio on research partnerships with the public and private sectors, and training and knowledge mobilization initiatives. His research which has been published in journals such as Social Science & Medicine and Health Economics is focused on access to healthcare. Dr. Gibson is also the Network’s lead on research data management and works extensively with the Alliance as part of the Network of Experts in research data management.
Tuesday, February 14th, 2023, 1:30-3:00pm
Introduction to REST APIs with OpenRefine / Kelsey Poloney (SFU)
This workshop will introduce participants to web APIs with a focus on using REST APIs for accessing data. Learn about common HTTP methods and responses used in REST APIs and how to understand and extract information from data in JSON format. This workshop will include a tutorial on some of OpenRefine’s API functions, including fetching data from URLs, parsing JSON, and reconciling data with an external source.
Kelsey Poloney (she/her) is the Data Management and Systems Archivist at the SFU Library. She provides technical support for data migration and digital preservation as well as consultations and workshops on research data management topics.
Wednesday, February 15th, 2023, 10:00-11:00am
Curating and Visualizing Inspiration through Data: The Places and People that Connect Katherine Dunham’s Repertory / (Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit)
We know that touring is important for performing artists, but how do we better understand the connections between performers and the places they travel to? In Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, our team (Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, Tia-Monique Uzor) manually curated datasets that documented the African American choreographer’s daily whereabouts from 1937-1962, the dancers, singers, and musicians who joined her as she travelled the world, as well as how she reimagined the places she travelled in her choreography. For this presentation, we’ll offer an overview of the Dunham’s Data project as a whole and key takeaways, with specific focus on data curation, analysis, and visualization that accounts for Dunham’s multidirectional inspiration and influence.
Harmony Bench (The Ohio State University) and Kate Elswit (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) have been collaboratively developing a digital humanities practice since 2013. They recently concluded the award-winning project Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (2018-22), about the questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance.
Wednesday, February 15th, 2023, 1:30-2:30pm
Exploring BC’s Community Information Tool / Susan Mordy, Krista Zens, Raman Sanghera (Ministry of Citizens Services)
The Community Information Tool (CIT) is a central access point for data to help planners, policy makers, economic developers, researchers and academics thrive in the digital economy. The CIT compiles over 40 data sets offering insights into regions across B.C. with integrated socio-economic, connectivity and community assets data. The CIT assists users to better understand multiple factors that are happening within a community and region to support analytical and forecasting work, offering easy access to data-driven insights for communities in B.C. In this session, you will learn how to use the CIT as a comparative tool to see how one community is similar or different from another, search attributes of a community using your own criteria, and view a culmination of different data produced at the community level.
Raman Sanghera is the Innovation Strategist in the Ministry of Citizens’ Services Connectivity Division. She assists in tool development cycles, webinars and demos. Raman is passionate about making data easily accessible for all, which presents itself in every aspect of her role.
Susan Mordy is the Application Lead in the Ministry of Citizens’ Services Connectivity Division. She works with external vendors on tool development to constantly update datasets and incorporate feedback. Susan has many years of experience in sharing data, and she believes data works best when it can be easily understood.
Krista Zens is the Director of Analytics & Tools in the Ministry of Citizens’ Services Connectivity Division. She has over 18 years of experience in the GIS and data management fields. Krista enjoys drawing insights from data, especially when that means presenting multiple contexts in a visual format.
Thursday, February 16th, 2023, 11:00am-12:00pm
Community and Stakeholder Engagement for Ethical Data-Driven Research / Brittney Schichter (PHSA)
Engagement with the individuals interested in, impacted by, and responsible for implementing the findings of research has been a methodological paradigm shift in the health research sector in the last decade and is gaining popularity in other disciplines. Embedding community, stakeholders, patients, clients, or end-users in research is an ethical approach which leads to results that are grounded in contextual understanding, and thus more likely to be implemented in a real-world setting. Despite the increasing popularity of this approach, data-driven research tends to lag behind in this sphere, partly due to an uncertainty about how to best engage with those that may not have the technical expertise to understand the methodological approaches used. In this talk, we will learn about best practices for engagement, offer tools that may help you to undertake this kind of approach, and review specific examples to help illustrate the concepts.
Brittney Schichter (Director, Research Integration and Innovation, BC Provincial Health Services Authority) supports all PHSA researchers in research compliance and in fostering a culture of research across the health authority. Prior to this role Brittney was the SFU Research Navigator for the BC SUPPORT Unit Fraser Centre, in which she supported researchers in conducting patient-oriented research at SFU and Fraser Health. She has expertise in patient-oriented methodology, skills training for patient engagement, and facilitating collaborations across sectors and among patients, clinicians, academics, and government. Brittney is a lawyer by training, has a background in research ethics, and currently serves as the ethicist on the BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital Research Ethics Board.
Thursday, February 16th, 2023, 1:00-3:00pm
Tidy up your data: Using MS Excel & Power Query to transform and organize your data / Cairo Sanders (UVic)
This workshop provides participants with a framework to recognize and tidy messy data, and some practical skills in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power Query to enable data collection in a tidy format, so that analysis is possible. Hands-on participants must have MS Excel (2019+) with Power Query.
Cairo Sanders is UVic Libraries Data Analyst supporting the Libraries with organizational analysis, including data collection and reporting.
For a list of all events offered by the UBC Library Research Commons including data-related workshops not listed above, see our events calendar.
If you have questions, concerns, or accessibility needs related to Love Data Week events please email research.commons@ubc.ca.