Love Data Week is an international celebration of data organized by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) that takes place every year during the week of Valentine’s day. The theme this year was “Where’s the Data?”—a way to get people thinking about data’s journey from collection through storage and preservation. The theme opened up exciting possibilities for interactive programming, whether that was hosting data-themed games, building data literacy skills, or diving into the ethics of responsible data use.
Data Librarians, Digital Humanities, Quantitative Resource Center (QRC), PEPS (Presentation, Events and Production Support) and Academic Technology worked with various departments across campus to host data-related events for the week. Here are some of the highlights:
- Tuesday, February 10, the Office of Health Promotion provided flyers with 13 data points on health and well-being at Carleton.
- Wednesday, February 11, the Digital Humanities center provided a workshop for data-curious folks to turn their projects, artifacts, or other materials into data.
- Thursday, February 12, the Sustainability Office hosted a session called “Show Us the Data: Advancing Accountability and Justice in Carleton’s Sustainable Futures Framework” where they explored how to find, preserve, and use data to drive institutional and regional climate justice.
- Friday, February 13, the Math/Stats Skills Center used candy for a data physicalization project: to create a distribution, estimating the true proportion of specific flavors/colors within a bag of bite-sized candies.
Throughout the week, the QRC live streamed webinars hosted by ICPSR while the Library displayed a slideshow of different data across the world, provided a whiteboard with graphs asking students to ‘caption the data,’ and supplied a crafting table with data-themed Valentine cards.
If you are interested in creating a similar campus-wide event and need technical support, please contact Academic Technology by emailing at@carleton.edu. The AT team can help you find the technical teams needed to run a successful event!