Love Data Week

Cookies, Coding, and Conversation

Details TBA.

• Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2025
• Time: 12:30pm - 2:30pm
• Registration required. Please contact Susan Richter at srichter@msu.edu for more information.

Telling the truth with Tableau: Learning how not to lie with data

In honor of Love Your Data Week, we present a workshop on best practices for honest data visualization and mapping. In this workshop we will learn the basics of the data visualization software Tableau while discussing best practices for truthful data visualization. It is easy to mislead with data and maps and we will present examples of poor data visualization practices to avoid.

This is a hybrid workshop, the in person portion will be held in the DSL Computer Classroom and a Zoom link will be provided after registration.

If you have any questions about the workshop content please contact: barber85@msu.edu or atickner@msu.edu

Details:

• Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2025
• Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
• Location: DSL Classroom/Lab: (Main Library, 2 West) 
• Click here to register.

Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon: Help Transcribe the African American Perspectives Collection at the Library of Congress

"Without a struggle, there can be no progress.” - Frederick Douglass

Participate in a birthday celebration for Frederick Douglass, who was one of the most prominent Black thinkers and anti-slavery advocates in American history. The celebration focuses on food, joy, and action, oriented around a transcribe-a-thon that brings together thousands of participants at more than 100 simultaneous events around the world.

Students, teachers, and community members will help to transcribe the African American Perspective Collection at the Library of Congress. This collection offers a wide-ranging look at Black history and culture through prominent figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Booker T. Washington. It has been digitized and will be made available through collaborations with the Library of Congress and the By the People platform.

The transcribe-a-thon will be streamed live on YouTube in the DSL Flexspace and Classroom. The transcribing will be done on Crowd.loc.gov, a citizen science platform led by the Library of Congress. Douglass Day invites people from all backgrounds to join in this effort to make Douglass’s correspondence more widely accessible and searchable.

In honor of the birthday of Frederick Douglass, lunch and celebratory cake will be provided for all participants. A wide range of dietary needs will be taken into account in catering orders.

Drop-in any time during the event. Registration is encouraged but not required, especially if you are an instructor planning to integrate this event into your class. Signing up for the event will allow us to communicate with you prior to the transcribe-a-thon.

This event is being co-sponsored by DH@MSU, the College of Law, the Kelley Institute for Ethics and the Legal Profession, and the MSU Libraries for "Douglass Day" and "Love Data Week."

Details:

• Date: Friday, February 14, 2025
• Time: 12:00pm - 3:00pm
• Location: Digital Scholarship Lab: (Main Library, 2 West) 

BTAA Love Data Week Events

Click here for a list of upcoming and past Love Data Week events hosted by participating institutions.

Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship Rules

As part of Love Data Week the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is hosting the second annual Data Viz Championship across all the institutions. The event is open to all MSU students and employees and is an opportunity to show case MSU’s data visualization abilities. Interim Provost Jeitschko will judge the MSU winner and the winner will receive a certificate from President Guskiewicz and two tickets to an MSU sporting event! The winning entry will then be provided to the BTAA for judging across the whole of the BTAA. 

Students

Your challenge is to use the U.S. National Park Visit Data (1979-2023) – Responsible Datasets in Context (responsible-datasets-in-context.com) to devise a data visualization to address the question(s) of your choice. You may supplement with additional publicly available data should you choose to do so. Have fun and be creative! Students must be actively enrolled at the institution for graduate or undergraduate coursework, thesis, or dissertation study.

Student Prizes:

• Signed certificate from President Guskiewicz
• Two ticket for Men's Hockey: MSU vs Penn State: Saturday, February 22, 2025, 6pm

Faculty/Staff

theme of the Big Ten (i.e., athletics, enrollment data, etc.). You can also submit an existing visualization used at your institution. Visualizations can pertain to the institution as a whole or to a specific initiative or population. Submissions should follow institutional data policies.

Faculty/Staff Prizes:

• Signed certificate from President Guskiewicz
• Two ticket for Men's Basketball: MSU vs Purdue: Tuesday, February 18, 2025, 7pm

Resources: 

• Data Prompts
• Sample Prompts
• Tutorials
• Datasets

Submission to the Challenge

Each institution may submit one student visualization and one faculty/staff visualization to the Championship. Submissions should be sent via the institutional coordinators and must include an image for use in a thumbnail, a title, a short description, and a publicly available URL. This is a two-step process. First, submit your entry through this form. One student and one faculty/staff submission will be chosen to move onto to compete in the BTAA Data Viz Championship. Institution submissions are due January 17, 2025.

Please save the date for the Showcase. For more information, contact irdata@msu.edu.

Enter Here

1. Follow @‌lovedataweek on X and Instagram and spread the word about Love Data Week 2025.
2. Attend one (or more!) of the Love Data Week activities virtually from wherever you are. Check out the calendar of events.
3. Participate in ICPSR’s yearly Adopt a Dataset Program – learn about it and share how it could be an agent of change.
4. Recognize colleagues for their participation in Love Data Week activities and events with a Love Data Week-specific Certificate of Participation.
5. Use a cool Love Data Week background graphic as your Zoom background or screensaver.
6. Download, print, and share Love Data Week stickers with friends, students, and colleagues.
7. Have a data trivia contest with your team, office, staff, classroom, students, or family – and tell us what happened. (If you’re following us on social media, you’ll be able to see our daily trivia questions during Love Data Week.)

• For bragging rights! You will be the BTAA Data Viz Champ.
• It makes a great line on a resume!
• Chance to win signed certificate from President Guskiewicz
• Students: Two tickets for Men's Hockey: MSU vs Penn State
• Faculty and Staff: Two ticket for Men's Basketball: MSU vs Purdue

• Students can submit work that results from collaboration with another person, but both must be credited.
• Faculty and staff should credit all involved as authors of the work. 
• When collaborating, at least one person should be identified to present the work during the showcase. 

Any tool (or a combination of tools) may be used. This is not limited to Tableau or PowerBI.

• Student Requirements:
  • Students must use the U.S. National Park Visit Data (1979-2023)—Responsible Datasets in Context (responsible-datasets-in-context.com) at minimum. Students may supplement with additional publicly available data if they choose to do so.
  • Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login during the Championship voting.  
• Faculty/Staff Requirements: 
  • The viz should be used for something related to the Big Ten (e.g., athletics, enrollment data, etc. ) or information about the institution—be it the institution as a whole or a specific initiative/population. 
  • All submissions must follow the schools’ institutional data policies and guidelines (i.e., please do not submit a viz with Social Security Numbers or HIPAA information).  
  • Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login during the Championship voting.

Yes! We’d love for you to submit work, attend the Championship, and vote.

Each institution will set its own guidelines for determining a viz to showcase in the Championship. 

Please work with your university to ensure that data downloads are disabled.