Author: Melissa Sanchez
Melissa is a student employee with Technology Services and is a senior at Illinois majoring in Communications.
Love Data Week is an annual celebration of all things data with events and activities that take place during the week of Valentine’s Day. Originally started in 2016, this event quickly grew into an international celebration. It is currently hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. While there are many national and international events, many Big Ten institutions, including Illinois, also host their own events.
The theme for this year is “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?” The point is for you to think about who owns, collects and uses data.
To see a list of events you can visit Big Ten Academic Alliance Love Data Week or Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Some of the events will be recorded and posted on the ICPSR YouTube.
What is U of I doing for Love Data Week?
The biggest way Illinois is participating is through the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship!
The BTAA is the academic counterpart to the athletic Big Ten Conference and allows member schools to coordinate academic events like The Data Viz Championship. For the championship, each university will submit two visual representations of data–think pie charts and other types of graphs–one from a student and another from a faculty member.
The student submission this year was by Lauren Hyde, a computer science major, who submitted a visualization on the popularity of national parks. You can take a closer look at Lauren’s visualization and her analysis of the data on her submission website.
The faculty submission was by Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, a professor of computer science, who submitted a visualization on the GPAs of incoming Big Ten freshmen.
You can take a closer look at Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider’s visualization and his analysis of the data on his submission website.
You can participate in the Championship by voting for your favorite visualization. You can vote at the Student Data Viz Gallery or the Faculty Data Viz Gallery until February 14. You will be asked to provide your university email, and you can only vote once per category, so make it count!
How else can I participate?
The goal of the week is for you to be aware of and take care of your data, so here are some ways to do that:
- To secure your data you can
- use password managers
- use multi-factor authentication
- control your privacy settings
- don’t share your passwords
- make sure your passwords are unique
- To keep your data organized you can
- use folders or software like spreadsheets
- be consistent with naming documents
- regularly sort your new documents
- back up your data
You can read more about cleaning up your data (and different kinds of data), organizing your data and the dangers of digital hoarding on our Tech Services website.