Celebrate your data during Love Data Week!
Love Data Week takes place every year around Valentine’s day. Universities, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, corporations and individuals are encouraged to host and participate in data-related events and activities. Our programming includes sessions from several BC universities (SFU, UBC, UNBC, and UVic), but you don’t have to attend these institutions to participate – the talks and workshops are open to everyone. All events will be hosted online using Zoom, so you can attend from anywhere in the world, and better yet, registration is free.
Love Data Week is also an international event, with activities promoted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). If nothing local grabs your interest, you can explore the list of worldwide events.
We look forward to seeing you!
Using APIs to GET data from Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue
Tuesday, February 10, 2026 (10:00 AM-11:30 AM, Pacific Time)
Heard the term API but not quite sure how it can help you gather data for research or analysis? This beginner‑friendly presentation and workshop will introduce the basics of how APIs work and give you hands‑on practice making simple data requests using the most common type of API, called a REST API.
By the end of the workshop, active participants will be able to:
- Recognize the different parts of an API request link (URL)
- Make a basic API request using an online tool called Postman
- Write or adjust an API request link to include your own search terms
- Understand data that comes back in JSON format
- Know the general meaning behind response codes starting with 2, 4, and 5
- Explain what authentication, pagination, and response headers are in the context of APIs
Cairo Sanders is UVic Libraries Data Analyst supporting the Libraries with organizational analysis, including data collection and reporting
Communicating Data Like a Human: Use Data to Tell a Story!
Wednesday, February 11, 2026, (12:00 PM-1:30 PM, Pacific Time)
This concise session covers fundamental ideas and methods involved in communicating statistics effectively. Also learn how to communicate visually, by adopting general data visualization guidelines to plan, organize, and visualize your data story. Presented by Statistics Canada, this webinar will give you tips and tricks to communicate statistics effectively no matter their source.
Laszlo Temesvary, Statistics Canada
Data recovery & rescue: Some great geospatial data to cherish
Thursday, February 12, 2026 (10:30 AM-11:30 AM, Pacific Time)
Dr. Olaf Niemman Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria-UVic retired in January 2020 after 38 years. Olaf and his Hyperspectral-LiDAR Research Group along with Terra Remote Sensing collected approximately 40Tb of data of hyper & multi spectral and LiDAR data from 25cm to 20m spatial resolution from various locations on Vancouver Island, Metro Vancouver, BC, AB, and other parts of the world.
The data were transferred to UVic’s Enterprise Data Centre-EDC when he retired. Because of COVID, there was a lapse in describing the data and uploading it to a national repository so that it could be used by others. With persistence, the data was re-located in 2025 and the process of the creation of thorough metadata, ReadMe(s) and upload to Federated Research Data Repository-FRDR has begun. This presentation will share some of the highlights of the data and struggles thus far and ask audience members for their advice, knowledge and opinions.
Gabrielle Wade, YCW Geospatial Intern
Daniel Brendle-Moczuk, Geospatial & Social Sciences Data Librarian, UVic Library
Geopackages, or GIS without GIS
Thursday, February 12, 2026 (2:00 PM-3:30 PM, Pacific Time)
This presentation will provide an introduction to using Geopackage (and to some extent, Spatialite) spatial databases without using specialized geographic information systems (GIS) software. This doesn’t mean that it is a GIS replacement, but GIS software learning curves are steep, and may not be necessary depending on your needs.
Not sure if this is for you? Here are some situations where Geopackages can be useful:
- if you’re familiar with databases but not GIS software
- to analyse spatial data when the output is not a map (e.g. calculate distance between points)
- to filter or manipulate spatial data before opening it in GIS software (e.g. if source dataset is large)
- to work with spatial data where GIS software is not available (e.g. in mobile app development)
The only software you will need is an interface to SQLite (we will use DB Browser for SQLite). The presentation also presupposes some knowledge of SQL (structured query language), although if you don’t know any it may still be of use to you.
After completion you should have an understanding of:
- What a geopackage is and what it does
- How to perform basic queries
- How to perform some basic geographic operations
- How to export your data, either as a data table or in a spatial format.
Paul Lesack, Data/GIS Analyst, UBC Library
Jeremy Buhler, Data Librarian, UBC Library