Guest Post: Will Dean, Research Data Services Librarian
The ice and snow of February are fading (and for the most part, happily), but our fond memories of Love Data Week remain. This year, we explored some central questions around where data is–and isn’t–and learned new techniques to make data visualizations and analyze our research data.
For access to session recordings from Love Data Week, please refer to the Love Data Week guide
Finding Data in Many Ways
Laws and policies are constantly evolving, but keeping track of those changes across 50 states and countless local jurisdictions can be challenging. We welcomed experts from the Center for Public Health Law Research Center (CPHLRC) to present on how to find data on laws and policies from across the US, how to identify good quality legal data, and how to transform and use it to understand the rapidly changing legal world. Watch Finding Law Data!
For more ways to find and use data, we also hosted workshops on how to extract data for creating a systematic review, using our text mining tools to find data within textual sources, creating maps of Philly neighborhoods with open street mapping software, and how to make your data visualizations accessible.
Where does Data Live?
Data is everywhere, but where exactly it lives is an important question with many implications in our political and social lives. This year we delved into those questions with presentations on the Data Rescue Project, and what data centers are and the issues around where they are located. Missed the event? Data Rescue Project recording.
Dr. Lynda Kellam, from the Data Rescue Project, presented on the group’s efforts to organize and preserve data from the federal government that was under threat of removal from publicly accessible sources. Their work has helped preserve swaths of important public data and has expanded to areas outside of US governmental data.
Dana McDonald, who both works in data centers and studies them, presented on what data centers are, and some of the socio-economic and environmental issues with their location and operation. Missed the event? Data Centers recording.
Thanks to all our presenters and everyone who came out to celebrate and learn about the world of data around us, and the work of our researchers to understand it!