Love Data Week 2023 at the University of Southampton was about inspiring our community to use data to bring about changes that matter. This year, we focused on helping new and seasoned researchers by organising a varied series of talks and discussions over the week.
These included:
What you need to know about collecting and sharing your data? Dr Sami Kanza (PhD, Chemistry, 2018) who currently works as a Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry recounted her journeys with data during her PhD folowed by a talk from Isobel Stark, Head of Research Data (Library) reminding staff and PGRs on the training and support that is available from the Research Data team.
Qualitiatve Data: The Human side of research data. Dr Brian Pickering callied on his years of experience as a researcher and a member of the Association of Internet Researchers, the Research Data Alliance, the British Psychological Society, and the British Computer Society to deliver a fascinating talk about collecting, analysing and publishing qualitative data and the insights it can bring.
Panel Discussion on Data: Agent for Change. Isobel Stark - Head of Research Data and IP chaired a panel discussion with the theme Making data as "open as possible and closed as necessary". Profs Christian Bokhove (Education), Marion Demossier (Languages) and Sophie Ferguson, Head of Information Governance discussed what this means to their discipline/professional practice and how research data could be an agent for change.
Datakind:Making Data an agent for change. DataKind UK is a charity which puts into practice this year's theme: Data, agent for Change. Datakind's stated mission is "helps social change organisations use data science to have more of an impact" and they do this by connecting them with some of the UK’s best data scientists for free. Dr Adam Hill talked about the sort of projects that he and others from the University have been involved in.
Love Data Week 2021: Loving 2020 dataA member of our Research Data team was inspired by the Love Data 2020 data visualisation competition to create a temperature blanket charting the highest daily temperature every day during 2020. Find out more in our blog post Love Data Week 2021: Loving 2020 data.
This year at Southampton, the Library ran a competition for staff and students to explore data visualisation. The challenge was to present Hartley Library entry gate data in a creative, artistic or innovative way.
The pieces you see here were submitted to the competition based on datasets for Hartley Library Gate Data for the Academic Year 2018-2019 dataset is available in our institutional repository.
The idea of using Hartley Library entry gate data across an academic year appealed, especially because it tied in nicely with 2019 marking 100 years of Highfield Campus.
In May 1919 there were 215 students, rising to approximately 300 by October 1919 (Nash and Sherwood, 2002). We currently have more than 24,500 students enrolled at the University, with 1,436,491 visits to Hartley Library in the academic year 2018-2019.
Submissions are on display at the Hartley library level 4 corridor (opposite the photocopiers) during Love Data Week 2020.
The Library's Research Engagement Team organised a series of public seminars during the International Love Data Week in February 2019.
The 2019 theme was Data in Everyday Life with two sub-themes of open data and data justice. We tweeted and posting on social media throughout the week using #SotonlovesData #lovedata and #LoveData19
In addition to the talks below, the week also saw the launch of Turing @ Southampton. The University of Southampton is a University Partner of The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. The Web Science Institute acts as the main point of contact between the university and The Alan Turing Institute.
Alison Knight: Can privacy still exist in an age of datafication?
Prof. Ros Edwards: Big data, qualitative style
Chris Gutteridge: There's no such thing as open data