Ethical Data Dilemmas in Budget Development

Participants will learn strategies to strengthen transparency, consistency, and integrity in budget planning. 

Introducing Computational Thinking 

Computational thinking is an essential prerequisite for anyone wanting to learn to program computers and write code. This workshop will take you through the steps to develop a computational mindset. 

Recipe for Understanding University Data

Have you ever reviewed a report and encountered terminology that was unfamiliar, leaving you uncertain about whom to consult or where to begin? You may have sought to understand the distinction between regular and externally funded enrollment or wished to clarify when interest begins to accrue on a Federal Direct Subsidized versus an Unsubsidized Loan. Perhaps you have come across the term FTE and wondered about its precise meaning.

This session will guide you to the resources that provide clear, authoritative answers to questions such as these.

Data Organization in Excel: Love Canal Edition

Data organization using spreadsheets: Good data organization is the foundation of any research project. Typically, we organize data in spreadsheets in ways that we as humans want to work with the data. In order to use tools that make computation more efficient, such as programming languages like R or Python, we need to structure our data the way that computers need the data. In this lesson, you will learn:

• Good data entry practices - formatting data tables in spreadsheets.
• How to avoid common formatting mistakes
• Approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets Basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets
• Exporting data from spreadsheets

Your Community in Data: Exploring Census Tools and Social Explorer

Join us for a hands-on workshop where we’ll unlock insights hidden in U.S. Census data. You’ll learn how to use data.census.gov to find demographic and economic data, then bring those numbers to life with Social Explorer’s interactive maps. Whether you’re curious about local trends, planning a project, or just love data, this session will show you how to turn statistics into a clear picture of your community and beyond.

Saving the Planet with Data

The University at Buffalo has ambitious goals on climate action. Come learn how it leverages data to drive and communicate its sustainability efforts. This session will explore the tools, metrics, and storytelling strategies that transform complex data into compelling narratives. Learn how UB tracks progress toward climate goals and engages stakeholders through reporting. This workshop offers practical insights into turning numbers into meaningful stories that inspire action.

Data Engineering for AI: Tailoring Open-Source Models for Unique Challenges

This session will explore data engineering and data cleaning, focusing on methodologies for creating high-quality datasets to support advanced Large Language Models. Attendees will gain practical skills in dataset development to support model fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation, and understand how to build efficient pipelines from raw data to curated datasets. Drawing on best practices and real-world examples, this session is valuable for both experienced data scientists and those interested in improving AI performance through robust dataset development.

Data Cleaning Using OpenRefine: Love Canal Edition

An important part of the data workflow is preparing the data for analysis. Some of this involves data cleaning, where errors in the data are identified and corrected or formatting made consistent. This step must be taken with the same care and attention to reproducibility as the analysis. OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful free and open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another.

Visualizing the Love Canal Timeline

Come learn about the Love Canal chronology while making a visually compelling timeline. You'll get to use materials from the collection to make a timeline with TimelineJS. We'll also cover best practices for managing media data, storytelling planning, and more. 

UB’s Enterprise Data Strategy Focus

Over 10 years ago UB began a data governance journey to align strategy, define objectives, and establish policies surrounding enterprise information.  The current enterprise data strategy initiative seeks to apply the lessons learned from data governance to support expanded information access, streamline process, and modernize the infrastructure supporting campus data management. This presentation focuses on potential improvements to requesting campus information and modernizing our information toolsets that are part of this effort.

Using Data to Understand Ship Breaking Practices (Additional Information)

Ship breaking is the practice of dismantling ships at end of life. This is typically an environmentally harmful practice and dangerous to the workers who perform it. Learn about this industry and how the NGO Shipbreaking Platform tracks companies that skirt legal conventions to illegally dismantle vessels. You will also learn about Databricks, a state-of-the-art data analytics platform, used here as the vehicle to perform the analysis.

Simple Data Analysis and Visualization in PowerBI: Love Canal Edition

Now that you have collected and cleaned up your data, how do we use it to answer our research questions? PowerBI is a robust tool within Microsoft365 that can be used to explore, analyze and visualize your data all in one place. This introductory workshop will use the web version of PowerBI to upload a dataset and create a simple visualization to really make your data shine.

Open Research and Contributor IDs (ORCID)

In this workshop we will walk through how to create an ORCID, reasons why using an ORCID matters, and how to connect your ORCID to some of the major systems that can update ORCID records.

The Long Haul: Best Practices for Making Your Digital Project Last 

You've invested a lot of work in creating a digital project, but how do you ensure it has staying power? We'll look at choices you can make at the beginning of project development to influence sustainability, best practices for documentation and asset management, and how to sunset your project in a way that ensures long-term access for future researchers.

Mapping Your Community: Geospatial Data with Google Earth

Discover how to visualize and analyze location-based data in this hands-on workshop. Using Google Earth, you will learn fundamental GIS concepts that include layering spatial data, creating custom maps, and exploring geographic patterns. No prior experience is needed - attendees will need a Google account to follow along.

The Human Side of Numbers - How Stories Make Data Matter

In a world increasingly driven by dashboards, metrics, and algorithms, the ability to make meaning from data has never been more essential. This session explores how storytelling—long a core strength of the humanities—can transform data from static numbers into narratives that inform, persuade, and inspire action. 

Participants will gain insight into the unique value that humanities scholars bring to data-centered work, from critical thinking and audience awareness to ethical reasoning and cultural analysis. 

This interactive session will highlight emerging career paths at the intersection of data and the humanities—including data communication, visualization, UX research, digital scholarship, and research outreach—and offer practical strategies for helping students connect their storytelling skills to data-driven roles. 

Join us to explore why data needs storytellers, and how UB’s humanities community can play a powerful role in shaping meaningful, responsible data narratives.

Managing Qualitative Responses with Smart AI Prompting

The Jacobs School administers hundreds of Course Evaluations on an annual basis, which include qualitative questions about the students’ experience with their courses, instructors, clerkships, among other topics. As a best practice in quality improvement, it is essential to review their qualitative feedback for outliers, themes, and to make sense of the context surrounding the vast quantity of data we collect. By carefully implementing AI prompts using the COSTAR framework, the office has been able to process this vast amount of data quickly and use it more effectively in its analysis for course review, when previously this data was often ignored or used with bias.  In this session, the COSTAR framework will be demonstrated in the context of qualitative data analysis.

Data Justice for Food Justice

Is food justice possible without achieving data justice? A team of researchers from the UB Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab present their work tackling this question through an interactive workshop on the intersection of data and food. Participants will hear about examples of (in)justices throughout the lifecycle of data, how these impact food systems planning, and the consequences that communities ultimately face. Focusing on the design and impacts of food systems data dashboards as a tool for researchers and practitioners, participants will explore and discuss real world examples, coming away with a better understanding of how data decisions have cascading effects on people and society.

UB Food Lab Project

• Jane Dai
• Molly Riordan
• Kate Hays

TBD