What Is Love Data Week?

This is an annual celebration that takes place during the week of Valentine's Day and is dedicated to celebrating data topics, including data preservation, sharing, and dissemination. Love Data Week started in 2016 as Love Your Data Week; over time, it's celebration has spread internationally by a variety of institutions, organizations, and data lovers. It is now hosted by Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) who coordinates a planning committee that develops annual themes and a core set of activities and materials.

At Lewis Library, we like to approach this process through the analogy of a camping trip. Just like a camping trip, creating a data management plan (and acting on it!) takes a copious amount of planning and thought. Come with us on our data adventures to ensure s'more love for sharing!

Love Data Week emphasizes the importance of making sure your data is accessible and follows FAIR principles. This means making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. To make sure you're doing that, follow these steps:

• Make a data plan
• Collect and analyze your data
• Securely store your data
• Publish and share your data
• Promote Reuse (using resources like the HSC at Fort Worth Data Repository!)

The path you take on this journey might not be linear, but it'll be worth it!

You can learn more about data at HSC on our Digital Scholarship page and by taking advantage of the HSC Fort Worth Data Repository. Are you ready to get started? Learn about creating a data management plan using our Research Data Management guide!

What's Happening in 2025?

On Campus

This year's Love Data Week theme is "Whose Data Is It, Anyway?" Throughout February 10-14, we'll explore who owns the data we use and how it is created before it gets to us. 

We've created a series of engaging data visualization activities to gather your opinions on hot topics like "Does pineapple belong on pizza?" and "What's the best book genre?" In our case, the data creators will be you! Find us on the second floor of the library and in the IREB lobby to cast your vote, share your ideas, and participate in other exciting activities. We will have fun giveaways for participation, so be sure to stop by!

Virtual

The Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) is offering a series of online trainings for Love Data Week! Whether you're just getting started, learning how to create visuals in Excel, exploring how to find and share data, or diving into the world of AI, there’ssomething for everyone. These sessions will run from February 10th to 13th, entirely online. Don’t forget to create an account and RSVP to secure your spot, receive all the meeting details, and any MLA credits for qualifying classes.

Missed Love Data Week? Be sure to check back once it’s over for any class recordings.

Data Ownership

This year's theme is "Whose Data Is It, Anyway?" reminding data users the importance of referring back to the source. To illustrate this, Lewis Library posed the question: "Do you LOVE pineapples on pizza?" In IREB, anyone can respond to this question by placing a pineapple piece sticker for "Yes" or a pepperoni piece sticker for "No". Participants of this interactive poster board are data points and Lewis Library is a data collector. In the Library Lobby, anyone is able to place a guess about how many candies are in the jar at the table, additionally offering their email to be contacted as the winner. Again, participants become data points and Lewis Library is a data collector. At the end of these activities, who owns this data?  

Data ownership can be complex. Ownership is not just about who collects data, but involves who controls, accesses, and benefits from it. Rest assured, librarians are responsible and moral stewards of data (we won't tell anyone you like pineapples on pizza!) and the data points themselves are anonymous and hard to trace. Though we are collecting your email address, we are only using this information to contact the winner. However, in other cases, it is possible that bad actors might want to get ahold of important information that is kept on your behalf by third parties, large corporations, the government, etc. If these parties don't manage your data securely, you might hear about a data leak or a data hack.  

This is especially pertinent in healthcare as many data are kept by healthcare organizations and providers on behalf of patients—and all of this data is protected by HIPAA. As you work beyond the classroom, take time to consider where the data you interact with is coming from!