CISS Joins BU Libraries & Data Ventures for ‘Love Data Week’ (2/10-14) Programming

Do you love data? If so, please join CISS, BU Libraries, and Digital Ventures in celebrating International Love Data Week! “Love Data Week” is an international celebration of data that takes place annually during the week of Valentine’s Day. The purpose is to raise awareness about the importance of good data management practices, data sharing, and responsible use of data in research and across various fields; essentially, “loving” data by treating it with care and respect. 

The 2025 theme is “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?” Take a minute to think about who owns data compared to who uses data. Different groups – like researchers, the government, companies, or organizations – may collect data. They could own it, share it, publish it online, or combine it. This year’s Love Data Week wants us to ask ‘Whose Data is it Anyway?’ This helps us remember to think about where the data came from before using it.  View all 2025 Love Data Week events and activities happening locally and virtually around the world.

How can YOU celebrate Love Data Week?

• Follow CISS on social media. Follow CISS on Instagram  or Bluesky to see mini-profiles of CISS affiliates and their favorite data sets during the week of February 12.
• Attend a virtual Love Data Week class or activity at ICPSR. ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) is the largest social science data archive in the U.S., with more than 350,000 data resources. It hosts specialized collections of data in education, crime, aging, substance use, terrorism, and more. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. A centerpiece is the annual summer workshop program, which offers scholarships and TAships for graduate students.
• Tell us about your work with data. Do you have a favorite data set you’d like to teach others about? Are you hoping to learn more about data housed at or beyond BU?  Or best practices in data management? Fill out this short survey and tell us how you’d like to pitch in.
• Learn more about BU’s supports and services for data users and creators. Check out the programs at Digital Ventures, Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences,  BU Spark! and more.
• Participate in a future information session. CISS and Digital Ventures will be hosting a ‘meet and greet’ in April, followed by a hands-on data workshop in Fall 2025. Keep your eyes open for notices of future events where we discuss ways to collect, store, and analyze data at or beyond BU.
• Learn more about data sovereignty. Learn about the legitimate right of Indigenous Peoples to control the access, the collection, ownership, application and governance of their own data or knowledge and/or information that derives from unique cultural histories, expressions, practices, and contexts at a February 12, 2025 2:30-3:30 pm webinar at UMass-Amherst.
• Other ideas? Please share with Deborah Carr, CISS director (carrds@bu.edu) or via this site.