Love Data Week (Feb. 8-12) is an international celebration of data hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Love Data Week is a project to raise awareness of the importance of data in our daily lives and to build a community to engage on topics in data analysis, preservation, curation, dissemination, sharing, and reuse. This year’s theme is “Data: Delivering a Better Future.” 
You can follow LDW on social media with the hashtag #LoveData21. Check out the events happening internationally. There are some useful website links on working with data at the end of this blog.
About the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
This is the first year that ICPSR is sponsoring Love Data Week. The ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 780 academic institutions and research organizations that provides “leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.” You can find data, share your data (for free!), use their resources to teach about data, and take courses in their summer program.
Digital Scholarship Workshops
This semester, the Libraries are offering Digital Scholarship workshops with a focus on data. Our theme is “Working with Our Data.” Please RSVP through the Events page (the Nest) or email Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship.
Using OpenRefine for Cleaning Data Wed., Feb. 17, 12:00pm – 1:30pm
When working with your dataset, have you wondered how to remove ‘null’ or ‘N/A’ from fields, handle different spellings of words, or determining whether a field name is ambiguous? For this workshop, we will use the open access software, OpenRefine, to clean, manipulate, and refine a dataset before analysis (https://openrefine.org/).
Basic Text Analysis using AntConc Mon., March 1, 3:00pm – 4:30pm
Computational analysis of textual data can aid in reading and interpreting large corpora. Exploring a large number of texts can uncover linguistic patterns for future exploratory analysis. Participants will gain hands-on experience analyzing textual data with AntConc (http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/). No coding experience necessary.
Working with Tableau Thur., April 1, 1:00pm – 2:30pm
Learn the basics of Tableau Public (free service) to create interactive visualizations of your data. This workshop will focus on the structure of the program and the terminology used. Students and faculty can download a one-year renewable license (https://www.tableau.com/academic).
ArcGIS Basics Wed., April 14, 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Learn all about Geographical Information Systems by acquiring an understanding of the fundamentals of mapping your data using ArcGIS (https://www.arcgis.com/home/signin.html). We will use ArcGIS public account and not ArcGIS Online.
Note: Each workshop will require the attendee to download and install the software before the workshop.
Register through the Events page at libraries.catholic.edu or email Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu). All workshops will take place on Zoom, recorded, and made available on the University Libraries’ web site or YouTube Channel.