Love Data Week
Introduction
Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, taking place during the week of Valentine’s Day. Universities, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, corporations and individuals are encouraged to host and participate in data-related events and activities. UIC is participating in Love Data Week by hosting data events and educational opportunities for faculty, staff and students. Check out some of the events below!
Featured Events
Data Stories
The Office of Research Development will host a “Data Stories” series of short presentations from UIC faculty who have used another group’s or institution’s existing dataset to make new discoveries, documented in publications and/or successful grant applications. A new video will be published each day. If you’d like to receive notifications about their release, please fill out this form.
Where's the Data Going? The Data Departure Checklist
February 9, 2026 | Zoom and registration
Is a collaborator moving to a new university? A student graduating? An unexpected personnel change happening? Don’t lose your research data! This session will introduce the Data Departure Checklist, a robust and customizable worksheet with prompts to encourage successful planning for transition of data, preventing unexpected data loss and avoiding misunderstandings about future use.
Contact Abigail Goben for questions.
Unlock Your Visibility: Disseminate Research and Data through INDIGO
February 11, 2026 | 12:00-1:00 PM | Register
Ready to boost the visibility and impact of your research? Learn how to use INDIGO, UIC’s institutional repository, to share your scholarship and data with the world. Learn how INDIGO can help you showcase your work, meet open access requirements and foster collaboration across disciplines. We’ll also walk you through uploading and managing data following the FAIR Guiding Principles—making your research Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Don’t miss this opportunity to maximize your reach and make your scholarship shine!
Contact Sandy De Groote for questions.
University of Illinois System Celebration
February 12, 2026 | 9:00 – 11:00 AM | Register
The strength of our community is each of you, and we want to help enhance our network of relationships. By bringing together our data communities across the system, we hope you can learn from each other, develop new connections and support each other in the future. Faculty and staff are invited to join a virtual meeting to share our current goals, discuss future plans and recognize our data visualization competition finalists.
Submit a visualization by January 25, 2026. Contact Thomas Warfield for questions.
Dataset Bingo
February 12, 2026 | 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM | Register
As part of UIC’s Love Data Week, Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER), the Data Science Hangout and Chicago Women in High Performance Computing are hosting a beginner-friendly, hands-on Data Bingo event in the Library of the Health Sciences, room 200A (Active Learning Classroom). Pizza is included! Book now – space is limited!
If you have been looking for new datasets to practice on, or you want to help others get started, this is a fun way to learn where to find data, how to gather it for your own projects and meet other folks doing data work.
Please contact Ola Giwa for additional information.
Introduction to Text Analysis: At the Crossroads of Close Reading, Computational Algorithms, and Large Language Models
February 13, 2026 | 12:00 – 1:30 PM | Register
This workshop is designed to introduce participants to the field of text analysis and its research workflow, which integrates text data collection, close reading, and the application of computational algorithms and large language models in the humanities. It is framed around two stylometric case studies focused on authorship detection: J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, who famously wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling under the male pen name Robert Galbraith, and T. S. Eliot, the modernist poet known for writing homoerotically-charged poems in private while simultaneously publishing more restrained public works. Together, we will consider several key questions. Can an author command antithetical voices across different works? If so, how can human readers and computational algorithms detect and measure this duality, and to what extent? How might human interpretations remain more holistic or meaningfully distinct?
By the end of the workshop, participants will understand the basics of stylometry and learn how to reframe interpretive research questions into forms that can be explored through quantitative methods within a text analysis workflow. Through hands-on activities, we will examine why combining both approaches is recommended – building a text corpus using traditional methods and experimenting with prompt engineering with Microsoft Copilot.
Please contact Heejoung Shin for additional information.