Love Data Week

Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon: Help Transcribe the Letters of Frederick Douglass

Date: Wednesday, February 14th
Time: 12:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: DSL Computer Classroom & Flex Space

Registration is encouraged but not required:
https://bookings.lib.msu.edu/event/11753835

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

Participate in a transcribe-a-thon that brings together thousands of participants at more than one hundred simultaneous events around the world. Students, teachers, and community members will help to transcribe an unprecedented collection of digitized papers left by Frederick Douglass. These papers have been digitized and made available through collaborations with the Library of Congress and the ByThePeople 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.

This event is being co-sponsored by DH@MSU and the Libraries for "Douglass Day and "Love Data Week."

Cookies, Coding, and Conversation

Date: Wednesday, February 14th
Time: 1:30pm - 3:00pm
Registration required. Please contact Susan Richter at srichter@msu.edu for more information.

For Love Data Week, Cookies, Coding, and Conversation will have a data trivia game. Participants will be quizzed on knowledge of MSU data, MSU acronyms, MSU fun facts, and statistics. Prizes will be given to winners in each category and overall winner. We will serve cookies and drinks.

Visualizing Data in Flourish

Date: Wednesday, February 14th
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: DSL Computer Classroom

Learn how to use the free data visualization application Flourish to explore data and make maps.

Ask a Business Librarian About Data

Date: Thursday, February 15th
Time: 10:00am - 11:30am & 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Location: E104 Conference Room, Eppley Center, Broad College of Business

What questions do you have about finding business data? Drop in for a 15 minute consultation with a Business Librarian to get the ball rolling!

Learn Text Analysis with Python:

Date: Friday, February 16th
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Location: Virtual

Register here to receive Zoom link:
https://bookings.lib.msu.edu/event/11764930

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” - Frederick Douglass

Building upon the Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon, this workshop asks the logical next question: what do we do with all of this text data? Participants will analyze the previously transcripted works of Frederick Douglass to understand the fundamentals of both python and computational text analysis.

No python experience is required. All materials necessary will be provided, no installation or downloads are required.

Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship Rules

As part of Love Data Week the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is hosting an inaugural 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 Interim President Woodruff. 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 Lego Brick Database, published on Kaggle, to devise a data visualization to address the question(s) of your choice. Your visualization should be publicly available for voting and judging. Have fun and be creative! Students must be actively enrolled at the institution for graduate or undergraduate coursework, thesis, or dissertation study. 

Potential research questions:

1.    What are the most common types of sets/bricks/colors?   

2.    How have Lego sets changed over time (e.g., number of bricks, type of bricks, colors, types of sets)? 

3.    In what ways do the themes (basic, police, racing, licensed brands) overlap and differ from each other?  

4.    What might we infer about the people for whom Lego are designed based on what we know about the sets and bricks themselves? 

Faculty/Staff

Submit an existing visualization that is used on your institution to share information. Visualizations can pertain to the institution as a whole or to a specific initiative or population. Submissions should follow institutional data policies.  

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. Interim Provost Jeitschko will choose one student and one faculty/staff submission to move onto to compete in the BTAA Data Viz Championship. Institution submissions are due January 29, 2024.

Voting

Institutional entries will be posted, by category, on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Challenge website, and members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance community will be invited to vote for the winner. Voting will be conducted from February 8 through noon, February 16, 2024. The visualization with the most votes for their category will win the Challenge. Login from an account associated with a Big Ten institution will be required to vote, ensuring that individuals can vote only once.  

Each entrant will be invited to present their work at the Data Viz Showcase on February 16 at 1 PM Central, 2 PM Eastern. At the end of the showcase the results of the voting will be announced, and the Challenge Winners crowned. 

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 2024.
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.)