We Heart Data: Love Data Week and Sharing What We Love

Have you heard of International Love Data Week? I hadn’t until my colleague John Bayhi asked several months ago if we should celebrate it in some way. Love Data Week is about the importance of data, generally, and particularly highlights finding and sharing data, based on the principles of open scholarship and open education. Thus, it is relevant not only to the data services offered by UTA Libraries but also our commitment to Open, and the Open @ UTA Libraries blog series.  

Readers of this series have already met the team behind UTA Libraries’ open initiatives. Now, it’s time to meet the UTA Libraries’ data team!  

• John Connolly, Data Scientist and Statistical Consultant 
• Rubab Shahzad, Data Visualization Librarian 
• Ryan Hedrick, Data Management Librarian 
• Sakshi Kabadi, Graduate Research Assistant for Data Visualization & GIS 
• Mansi Narwade, Graduate Research Assistant for Data Science 
• Varun Milind Joshi, Graduate Research Assistant for Data Science 

Check out all the data workshops that our data team is offering this semester. There are a few other folks that bring their data-related expertise to their roles at the Libraries, including: 

• Naveen Mukala, Graduate Associate for Digital Publishing  
• Abhijit Challapalli, Graduate Research Assistant for Digital Publishing 
• Amer Elsaad, Graduate Associate for Digital Projects 

These folks, and many of us at UTA Libraries, definitely love data. So, why not celebrate International Love Data Week! It is scheduled annually to coincide with the week of Valentine’s Day. This year at UTA Libraries, we are adding a component of Love Data Week to the new program established by Digital Projects Librarian for Digital Humanities, Whitney Russell. The Transcribe-A-Thon: Douglass Day 2024 offers skill-building and practical experience in transcribing important archival documents for public use. Transcribed documents transform archival materials into digitally discoverable, text-readable, and accessible datasets. Opportunities for a variety of analyses open up after transcribing! Join in on Valentine’s Day to contribute and learn about such analytical possibilities! 

Transcribe-A-Thons will be a staple of UTA Libraries Digital Project event offerings moving forward, with Whitney at the helm. This year, the correspondence of Frederick Douglass is the focus because Douglass Day is on Valentine’s Day, since Douglass chose Valentine’s Day as his birthday, not knowing the true date due to the conditions of slavery into which he was born. In the coming semesters, Whitney will bring in other documents and archival collections for the transcribing efforts, such as those held in UTA Libraries’ own Special Collections! You can be part of this crowdsourced scholarly project!

Valentine’s Day and week typically focuses on romantic love. But what about all those other loves that we have in our lives? When I first heard of Love Data Week, it made me think of the recent social trend to publicly and visibly express one’s nerdery/nerdom. When many of us were growing up and especially in the throes of adolescence, it wasn’t “cool” to be a “nerd” about things, so many of us tamped down our passion and excitement about Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragon or Anime or Jane Austen. These days, it seems more socially acceptable to express nerd-ness. 

In that spirit, I have a Valentine’s Day challenge for you all! In the comments section below, please share a kind of data that you love and/or a nerdom that brings you joy. I’ll get the ball rolling!  

I’m a sucker for the data that supports etymological analysis and interpretation, including the dates that words came into being, the source words that evolved into words we use today, and the causes by which words change over time. I often look up words that I encounter just to see how they came to be. For example, I recently looked up the origin of the word FART (I’m also a nerd for fart and poop jokes)! I am torn by my absolute love of the idea of braigetóirí (professional farters) entertaining an Irish chieftain at dinner and my anger at the 16th century Englishmen involved in creating a book to denigrate and subjugate Irish people. I’m also a bit of a nerd about my Scots Irish heritage.  

My friends know that I also have a huge section of my nerd heart reserved for Star Trek and Star Wars. So, what about you? Use the comments box below to share your data/nerdery loves with the world! Share it loud and proud! Let’s celebrate!  

Reach out to librariesops@uta.edu if you are interested in what UTA Libraries can offer to support your nerdery (or research and scholarship)! 

The cover image for this blog post is "Nerdery on Show with banner" by Leah McCurdy, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. It is a derivative of "Cinema Display with nerd stickers" by Chris Radcliff, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, and was modified to add the "Open @ UTA Libraries" banner.