Introduction

Love Data Week is coming back to FSU in 2023! Love Data Week, or LDW, is an international event where individuals and groups are encouraged to host and participate in activities related to any and all data. It occurs every week that Valentine’s Day lands, and focuses on helping people learn about the best data management practices and methods for interpreting data. LDW was started in 2015 and is headed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. For those looking to learn more about data or are interested in statistics, this is an excellent opportunity to ask questions and get started!

Events

Because looking at raw data can sometimes be boring, we’re looking to spice things up this year by including two new activities! We’ll be right inside the entrance of Dirac from 12:00 – 2:00 PM on Thursday and Strozier from 12:00-2:00 PM on Friday! First, we’re going to be doing an Adopt-a-Dataset activity, where participants will be able to “adopt” one of the openly available datasets we have displayed. Your task will then be to determine what conclusions can be drawn from the data, and you’ll receive a Dum-Dum for your work! After that, we’ll have a jar of Smarties at the table, with a list of numbers from a normal distribution on hand. From there, you’ll have to guess the number of smarties in the jar, and the person with the closest guess will win them all! In addition to the tabling events, our Research Data Management Librarian, Dr. Nick Ruhs, will be giving a workshop on Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel on Valentine’s Day (February 14) from 3:00-4:30. If you are or will be using Excel for your projects or research and are looking to enhance your skills, this will be a great workshop to attend!

Blog Posts

In addition to the wonderful events that are occurring during Love Data Week, we will be publishing two blog posts introducing the two new Data Fellows at FSU, Reagan Bourne and Sahil Chugani. In those posts, you’ll learn all about what inspired them to become a data fellow and how they became passionate about data analysis and management techniques.

Contact/Resources

For more information about any data questions/concerns you may have, you can either check out https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/ or contact Dr. Nick Ruhs, our resident Research Data Management Librarian, at nruhs@fsu.edu. Furthermore, if you ever need any assistance with any data question you may have, you can check out the walk-up hours for our STEM Data Fellows!

This blog post was written by Sahil Chugani (STEM Data Fellow) from FSU Libraries.