Love Data Week at Temple

Love Data Week is an international event that celebrates the development of data throughout time and how it shows up in everyday life.

Temple University Libraries celebrate 2026’s Love Data Week from February 9th to the 13th. Love Data weeks aims to focus on the importance of data and how it complements the acceleration of technology. This year’s theme: “Where’s the Data?” This theme offered a lens through which individuals could consider how data is lost, stored, preserved, and found.

Temple University Libraries put on a few different events throughout the week including, “Finding and Using High Quality Law and Policy Data”, “Where is the Data? Data Visualization for All”, and “The Data Rescue Project” along with several other programs designed by professionals at Temple University. 

Of the several talks “Data Centers: What, Where, and Why?” was an instructive talk presented by Dana McDonald, Technical Delivery Manager at NTT Data about Mcdonald’s research surrounding the socioeconomic impact and power usage effectiveness of data centers. 

“When we talk about the cloud, it is often found abstract and invisible, so today I want to make it more visible.” 

McDonald explains that Data Centers are not a metaphor. Whenever you stream a show, use AI, send an email, you have used a data center. Data centers date back to the 1940s with mainframe computers and have only grown more efficient and energy reliant throughout the years. Data centers are built strategically in areas based on power availability and cost, climate, land, and tax policy. When built, these data centers might consider the economic value it might offer the local area. All 50 states have at least 3 data centers. Virginia has the most with 570, Vermont has the least with only three, and Pennsylvania has 104 data centers. 

The biggest impact these data centers have are their energy omissions. In the United States data centers use about 2-4% of total electricity in the country, “To put this in perspective a single large hyperscale data center can power tens and thousands of homes, or a small city. But energy isn’t uniform, it depends on what the data center is doing and how it is about how it is designed and operated.” says McDonald

Pivotal impacts that data centers introduce to local communities are environmental stress like water scarcity and infrastructure investments. “Data centers do bring real economic benefits, but they raise questions about who benefits most and who carries the cost. But we certainly cannot live without this data.” 

As times begin to change and evolve, there have been roadblocks and complications beyond socio-economical stressors. The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated American initiative that was built to protect public data. In “The Data Rescue Project” presentation we hear from Dr. Lynda Kellam, the Snyder-Granader Director of Research Data & Digital Scholarship at University of Pennsylvania who started the project. The initial grass roots of this organization was made up of volunteers dedicated to advocating for public data access for all. 

The United States Government data resources are being removed or altered or inaccessible. “It’s not just a matter of federal data disappearing. We’re seeing application processes for certain data sets being shut down. There are not as many experts in the agencies, so we are losing expertise and scientific advisory support.” said Kellman. 

Formed in February 2025, in a year the organization has managed to store or rescue more than 2000 data sets covering over 90 government offices, store away thousands of terabyte mirrored data, and have accumulated over 500 volunteers. Data Rescue offers tools and library guides to secure data and ways to organize data with the project in order to store it away safely. 

Kellman operates data curation and preservation with FAIR principles meaning: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. With these principles Kellman explains that the main idea is about making data sharable and usable on a long term basis. 

Kellman explained, “The reason why data rescue is such an important thing, and not just web crawling. Depending on how deep the web crawl goes, it may not get the documentation or the files that are associated with the data set. Web crawling is great, you just aren’t getting the whole contextual package in one place.” 

Public data like food security surveys, maternal and infant mortality, variables of gender identity, and infrastructure mapping are only some of the ways data underpins everyday life. “Without this data, we aren’t able to answer questions. Data literacy is important for a lot of reasons. You need to be able to ask questions, to be able to answer those questions in ways that are verifiable, and you need to know where that data is coming from.”

In the age of artificial intelligence Kellman continues to talk about data literacy and the importance of having the ability to critically analyze what AI is giving you, “If someone is trying to make a claim or if someone is spreading misinformation, you want to have the ability to question what they are claiming.”

The goal of Love Data week is a time to consider how data shows up in our everyday operations. How data can affect livelihoods. Data development is a small part of the advancement of technology that contributes to the development and reshaping of education and society.