Endangered Data Week

Endangered Data Week is a new, collaborative effort to shed light on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled or lost. This event is coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, and cultural heritage institutions Kelvin Smith Library is working with departments across campus to raise awareness of threats to publicly available data, explore the power dynamics of data creating, sharing, and retention, and teach ways to make endangered data more accessible and secure. Next week, the library will host a series of events Feb. 26–March 2 in honor of Endangered Data Week. All of the events will be held in Kelvin Smith Library’s Freedman Center on the first floor. Learn more about Endangered Data Week at endangereddataweek.org/.

“Intro to Web Scraping”

Monday, Feb. 26 2:15 p.m. There is a lot of data on the web, some in old, out-of-date formats—difficult to gather and use. This hands-on workshop, led by University Technology’s Marie Vibbert, will be on getting data off the web and into a useful format for analysis.

“Citizen Analysts: How Regular People Use Public Data to Save the World”

Tuesday, Feb. 27 11 a.m. Easy accessibility of data can empower people to do their own fact checking and analysis, and report their findings to their community. This session, led by University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education’s Blaine Martyn-Dow, will give examples on the important role of the “citizen analyst,” and some strategies on how to become one yourself.

“Different Ways Data is Endangered”

Wednesday, Feb. 28 1 p.m. Join a faculty panel for a discussion of what biomedical data is collected, who controls it and who has access to your data. Will Bush, Dana Crawford and Jonathan Haines, all of the Institute for Computational Biology, will present at this session.

“Finding, Rescuing, and Fair Use of Government Data”

Thursday, March 1 2:30 p.m. This event will be a demonstration and discussion of how you can find, rescue and fairly use government data in your research and teaching initiatives. Kelvin Smith Library’s Mark Clemente, Amanda Koziura and Evan Meszaros will present.