Love data week 2021 events: Delivering a better future

Knock! Knock! Who’s there? A beta. A beta who? A beta future for data experts!

It’s that time of year again! No, it’s not the time of year when we all tell terrible puns but it is the time we celebrate Love Data Week with the highly topical theme this year of ‘Delivering a better future’. The training team at the UK Data Service continue to share on-demand, data-rich knowledge and fun with Love Data Week being no exception. Please register below to attend any of our free online training sessions to improve your data knowledge and skills, or simply join the wider community of researchers that are interested in learning about, teaching about and using data.

The highlight of our Love Data Week is a three-day workshop on getting and using crime data in the R statistical language, created in collaboration with methods@manchester and the University of Leeds. This explores a range of data including the Crime Survey for England and Wales unrestricted access teaching dataset, available from the UK Data Service. The workshop has limited space, due to personal guidance and teaching from our trainers, and a growing waiting list. Therefore, as with most of the UK Data Service training courses, all instructional sections of the workshop will be recorded and made available for viewing in your own time on the event web page and UK Data Service YouTube channel, and all the datasets, RMD files and other resources used in the workshop will be made available on the UKDS GitHub repository.

Another highlight is our webinar co-run with Kings College London about the new Catalogue of Mental Health, a searchable catalogue to help researchers find information about measures of mental health and wellbeing in UK cohort and longitudinal studies. The webinar will cover new data resources and mental health measures as well as how to find and access the relevant longitudinal data – and as usual, a recording will be available after the event on the UKDS YouTube channel.

Upcoming data skills training with the UK Data Service

So what do these events for #lovedata21 tell us about the future? From our expertise in delivering dedicated data-skills training to social scientists, the popularity of these events shows a real demand for more training about finding and using data. People are eager to learn, get involved and gain the skills and knowledge they need to answer the questions that matter to them. They want to use data that is fresh (maybe even real-time?) to address important problems and questions that affect people in their everyday lives. They want to see that data in various ways: sometimes numbers, sometimes graphs, and sometimes spread out over a geographic representation. In this way, their analyses and conclusions have the best chance of getting people’s attention, making a big impact and maybe even effecting change in policy – all to ultimately improve peoples’ lives.

Will this help them deliver a better future? Maybe. But as researchers, you will have to answer that knock at the door to find out.

With thanks to our guest writer, Dr. Julia Kasmire, one of our leading Computational Social Scientists and trainers. Julia researches and teaches on how to use new forms of data for social scientists with the UK Data Service and the Cathie Marsh Institute at the University of Manchester. She approaches this task as an interesting combination of thinking like a computer (essential for data sciences) and thinking like a human (essential for social sciences) in the context of complex adaptive systems. She is deeply committed to equality, diversity and inclusivity and is currently dabbling with stand-up comedy as a form of science communication.