Love Data Week 2025

Love Data Week is an international celebration of data that takes place each year during February – this year it’s celebrated from Feb. 10 to 14, 2025. This year’s theme is “Whose Data is it, Anyway?” You can learn more about the theme and what it means as a researcher on the International Love Data Week website. 

Throughout February, the library is hosting a variety of events, workshops, and planning activities to celebrate data. “Data play a crucial role in society. The Love Data Week events provide an opportunity for the U of G community to explore how data are used in daily life and research, their value, and the importance of handling them with care and respect,” said Lucia Costanzo, librarian, Research & Scholarship. 

Love Data Week Events 

Visualizing Data Using Everyday Objects – Tuesday, February 11, 2025, 12 to 1 p.m. (In-Person) 

In this hands-on workshop, participants will use everyday objects such as LEGO, Playdough, and string to visualize data. Through interactive activities, attendees will learn the basics of data visualization, what it means to place data feminism at the heart of your data visualizations and gain new perspectives on representing information. This session is great for beginners and anyone looking to make data more engaging, accessible, and fun. 

Register for Visualizing Data Using Everyday Objects. 

Reaching Your Research Data Destination: Depositing Data in a Repository – Tuesday, February 11, 2025, 12 to 12:50 p.m. (Online) 

Learn how sharing your data in a repository improves your visibility as a researcher, increases citations of your publications, gives you recognition for your work, attracts new collaborations, and most importantly allows for reproducibility and verification of results.

This session will help you:

• Explore the benefits of depositing and sharing your research data in a repository.
• Understand how the Tri-Agency Policy influences how data is deposited and shared.
• Describe the different research data repository options available.
• Prepare your research data for deposit.
• Consider licensing options for your research data.
• Summarize the steps of the data deposit process by viewing a live demo of depositing a dataset in the U of G Research Data Repositories
• Engage in an audience Q&A to address specific questions.

Register for Reaching Your Research Data Destination: Depositing Data in a Repository.

Strengthening Ethical Research through Informed Consent – Wednesday, February 12, 2025, 12 to 12:50 p.m.  (Online) 

The informed consent process underpins the ethical conduct of human participant research. During Love Data Week, we are celebrating how this process helps nurture transparency in the research process, protect participant rights and safeguard data/information. Just as love thrives on trust and respect, a robust and ongoing consent process clarifies researcher responsibilities and fosters a healthy research environment. Consent template resources will be shared with attendees and there will be an opportunity for Q&A with Research Ethics staff. Join us in this special Love Data Week presentation to learn more about how ethical practices in research can “love” and protect the data that drives impactful discoveries! 

Register for Strengthening Ethical Research through Informed Consent. 

Love Data? Finding Data – Thursday, February 13, 2025, 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Online) 

In this workshop we will learn how to navigate Canadian census data for Love Data Week. What data can we find on love and relationships? Learn how to search Canadian data for the topics you need for your research and what options are available for digging deeper into data. 

Register for Love Data? Finding Data. 

SPSS Micro 6: Independent Sample T-Test – Thursday, February 13, 2025 (Online) 

In this short workshop, you will learn the data type required for the test, check the assumptions for the test, and conduct both an independent samples t-test and a Wilcoxon signed-rank test. To attend this workshop, you do not require prior knowledge of SPSS, statistics.  

Register for SPSS Micro 6: Independent Samples T-Test. 

Author Event: Sean Michaels Discusses the Origin and Creation of his Novel Do You Remember Being Born? – Monday, February 24, 2025, 7 to 8 p.m. (In-Person)

In 2019, Giller Prize-winning novelist had his first encounters with a different kind of AI. It was three years before the launch of ChatGPT, but he found himself beguiled, unsettled—and even a little compromised—by these early Large Language Models. He began working on a book exploring this disquiet, and imagining how a great poet might respond to such technology—a poet like the infamous Marianne Moore, in her cape and tricorn hat. The result, Do You Remember Being Born?, has been hailed by WIRED magazine as "the definitive novel about art in the age of AI," and by the New York Times as "a jumping-off point for timeless meditations on art, family, connection and the meaning of a life." On February 24, Sean visits University of Guelph to discuss the book's origin and its creation—which was undertaken partly, and in deliberate discomfort, with AI tools. In his talk, he will raise new questions about the serious challenges and surprising opportunities provoked by these discoveries, and force us to rethink what it can mean to "collaborate." 

Register for the Sean Michaels Author Event.

Love Data Week Activities in the Library 

In addition to the workshops and events happening during Love Data Week, if you visit the library, you’ll find data-related activities on the first floor. Visit us to learn more about data, how we can support your data needs, and do some fun data-related activities. 

Supporting Your Data Needs at U of G  

At the library, we have many data related services to support your research at U of G. Our services designed to help you navigate your way through every step of the research data lifecycle, including:   

• Research Data Management (RDM) Support – We’ll help you through the organization, documentation, storage, and maintenance of your research data throughout the research process.  
• Data Collection & Surveys – we’ll help you find published data or create a survey so you can collect your own research data.  
• Data Cleaning & Preparation – we’ll teach you how to prepare your data for analysis and visualization; whether you’re working with data that you collected yourself, or data you found somewhere, we can help format it so it’s usable.   
• Data Analysis – we’ll help you organize, analyze, interpret, and present quantitative or qualitative data using data analysis software (like R, SPSS, and NVivo)  
• GIS Analysis – we'll help you find geospatial data and analyze it using Geographic Information System software.  
• Text Analysis – we'll help you use computational and statistical techniques to analyze text in books, magazines, newspapers, film scripts, song lyrics, social media, and more.  
• Data Visualization – we'll help you transform complex data into visualizations like graphs and infographics to make your data easier to understand.  
• Publishing your data – once you’re ready to, we’ll support you in publishing your data in one of U of G’s repositories, which provide free, secure access and long-term preservation for your scholarly and creative works.  

Curious if we can help? Connect with us to ask a question or book an appointment. 

Questions? 

Contact us. We’re happy to help. 

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