Join us for Love Your Data week, Feb. 12-17

The Library is celebrating international Love Your Data week, February 12-17. The purpose of the Love Your Data (LYD) campaign is 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. We will share practical tips, resources, and stories to help researchers at any stage in their career use good data practices.

Learn more about loving your data with events held at the John Crerar Library and on social media.

In 2015, the popular WBEZ podcast This American Life published a message retracting an episode. The episode featured an article published in Science, a highly respected peer-reviewed journal, about the success of canvassing. However, the data in the article was falsified.

How, as researchers, can we recognize good research and bad research? The most elemental way to verify a scholar’s claim is to analyze their data. In day 1 of Love Your Data week, we’ll be sharing resources to help you define good data and spot bad data. Follow Crerar Library on Twitter (@Crerar Library) for resources and case studies in defining good data.

You can also read David Brockman’s (Stanford) claim that the original article contained fake data, or listen to This American Life’s recap of the original story and updates featuring researchers replicating the canvassing experiment.

Good data documentation is important for so many reasons. Most notably, though, it makes analysis and write-up stages of your project easier and less stressful and improves the integrity of your scholarly research. On Tuesday, you can learn the basics of data documentation by attending our library workshop in the Crerar Computer Classroom from 4 to 5 p.m., or by following Crerar Library Twitter (@CrerarLibrary) for resources and horror stories on data organization gone wrong.

You can also learn more about documenting, describing, and defining by visiting the Library’s guides on Author and Research Identifiers and Data Management.

When data is good, it is findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable (FAIR). For example, this dataset is still around and usable more than 50 years after the data were collected and more than 40 years after it was last used in a publication. Today, we’re asking you to share your favorite data set with us. How and why is it good for your project?

Try out the FAIR Principles to describe and share examples of good data for your discipline. Tell us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (#loveyourdata)!

In a 2004 Science Daily News article, the National Science Foundation used the phrase “here there be data” to highlight the exploratory nature of traversing the “untamed” scientific data landscape. The use of that phrase harkens to older maps of the world where unexplored territories or areas on maps bore the warning “here, there be monsters” to alert explorers to the dangers of the unknown. While the research data landscape is (slightly) less foreboding, there’s still an adventurous quality to looking for research data. Learn the best ways to find data using library resources by attending our second library workshop in the Crerar Computer Classroom from 12:30 to 1 p.m. or by following Crerar Library on Twitter (@CrerarLibrary) to hear about our librarians’ favorite data sources.

Additionally, we invite you to explore the Library’s guide on Finding Data with library resources.

In 2015, The Atlantic published a story of a journalist, who, after being named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a 34-part news series, lost his publication to the Internet. Digital data loss can happen instantly. However, thanks to #datarefuge and Internet Archive, websites and legacy data are being preserved.

Securing legacy data takes time, resources and expertise but is well worth the effort as old data can enable new research and the loss of data could impede future research. The library provides resources to help the campus community secure data via our institutional repository: Knowledge@UChicago. Contact us to learn more.