Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, aiming to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse and research data services across the disciplines. During Brown’s Sixth Annual Love Data Week celebration, “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?,” the Swearer Center hosted two events reflecting on community-engaged projects supported by Brown’s Community-Engaged Data and Evaluation Collaborative (CEDEC). CEDEC is an initiative of the Swearer Center in close collaboration with the Annenberg Institute, Brown University Library, Data Science Institute, School of Professional Studies, School of Public Health and Watson Institute. 

Featuring insightful discussions on the labor behind data and the power of maps in storytelling, the first panel, “Elevating the Labor of Data,” explored the behind-the-scenes work of data visualization featuring collaborations with the City of Providence’s North Burial Ground and the Rhode Island Farm and Sea to School Network.

Jordi Rivera, a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Brown’s Department of Anthropology, details how the initial project with Providence North Burial Ground has grown into what it is today. Looking at headstones was a critical first step to collecting data, making it possible to now be “looking at differences in health outcomes between different racial groups, differences in causes of death, differences in class and health outcomes. It's blossomed from just collecting data into all of these other projects, digitizing archives.”

The second panel, moderated by Bonner Fellow Chloe Lau, “Designing Maps for Empowerment,” highlighted how maps shape narratives and amplify community voices and knowledge. One project represented was done in collaboration with Providence Neighborhood Planting Program and involved students and faculty from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and Brown Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.

The other project was from Providence Public Library and involved collaboration with Swearer Center’s Bonner Community Fellowship. The Rhode Island LGBTQ+ community archive project, a virtual project that explores LGBTQ+ histories and legacies in Providence through a series of timelines, virtual maps and a guided virtual walking tour, centers on three main themes; highlighting the history of LGBTQ+ people in Providence, creating community and pursuing the continuous fight for equal rights

Rhode Island State Librarian Kate Wells describes the archive project sharing, “I think the key to the way we approach the mapping project is that we use archival description and access models to sustain, heal and empower the community. We believe everyone's lived experience offers a contribution to documented history. And before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level, and tap into that simultaneously.”