Love Data week

Will Furnass

22 January 2020 14:43

Love Data Week is an annual global event designed to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.

The University of Sheffield’s Library have organised several events for this year’s Love Data Week (10-14 February 2020):

• 11th Feb, 10:00 - 12:00: DDP workshop on Looking after your Research Data. NB now fully booked but spaces available for subsequent sessions

  This workshop will help you to get the most out of your data by keeping it safe and secure, organising, describing, archiving and sharing it, and by augmenting it with pre-existing data from a variety of sources. You will have the opportunity to put what you learn into practice by starting a data management plan for your own research.

  Please note: this workshop will not include methods of data analysis or detailed advice on research ethics

  Recommended for: all non-final-year doctoral researchers.

  The key aims of the training are:

  • to introduce the concept of research data management (RDM)
  • to give you an overview of the current context and drivers for managing data
  • to help you start planning how you will look after your own data
  • to give you some practical data management tips to start using straight away
• 12th Feb, 12:00 - 14:00: Data Management Plan drop-in session

• 13th Feb, 12:00 - 14:00: Data Conversations: Delving into data visualisations workshop.

  Data Conversations are a chance for researchers and professional services staff to come together and discuss their research data and current issues in research data management. There will be presenters from across the University, as well as plenty of time to meet and chat with colleagues.

  Our first ‘Data Conversation’, to celebrate Love Data Week, will focus on the benefits and challenges of data visualisation for researchers.

  Data visualisations allow research to be more easily explored, evaluated and understood than by looking at the raw data alone. Visualisations can help communicate research to new audiences, highlight trends during the early, exploratory stages of a research project, and make sense of big datasets.

  Speakers will include:

  • Alasdair Rae (Urban Studies and Planning)
  • Colin Angus (SCHARR)
  • Charlotte Tomkins (History), Charles West (History), and Tom Stafford (Psychology)

  The Library, IT Services and the Research Software Engineering team have recently begun to develop new services to support data visualisation and there will be a chance for researchers to feed back on what services they would like to see in the future.

• 14th Feb, 10:00 - 12:00: Bring Your Own Data workshop.

  Is your data a bit messy? Can’t find that all-important file? Looking for a better way to structure your data but not sure where to start?

  Come along to this Bring Your Own Data workshop in Love Data Week and get hands-on support and advice to get your data in order.

  The session will start with some brief introductions to best practice in managing and analysing your data from experts in the Library and IT Services. We will then spend most of the time working with you to organise and structure your data - so make sure you bring some data with you!