Love Data 2024: Learning to program by transforming data into information visualization with W. Michelle Harris

Love Data is an international celebration and awareness campaign designed to build community and understanding around research data. This year's theme is “My Kind of Data”, which focuses on data equity, inclusion, and creating a kinder world through data. RIT Libraries is excited to be celebrating Love Data 2024! Please join us for the event below.

Harris describes and shows the process with which she assists her students in the New Media Interactive Development and New Media Design program in creating data visualizations through topics such as data structures, file input/output, and string manipulation using tools such as the p5js library and JavaScript. Harris highlights how this process empowers students to create and explore data trends in their own information visualizations, like professional data analysts do. 

Speaker: W. Michelle Harris, RIT

W. Michelle Harris is a media artist and an IGM/New Media professor at RIT. She is also a member of Rochester's WOC Art Collaborative. Her artwork has been shown at such diverse venues as the ACM SIGGRAPH, World Maker Faire, and INST-INT, as well as regional venues such as Gallery 74, the Baobab Cultural Center, Community Folk Art Center, Schwienfurth Memorial, and Squeaky Wheel. Most recently, her interactive video installation “In Their Wake” occupied the front window of the Democrat and Chronicle offices as part of the Current Seen Biennial. She has done live-mixed visuals for performances in collaboration with Juanita Suarez, fivebyfive, Dave Rivello, Reenah Golden, and most prolifically, BIODANCE. She received her BS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a MPS from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

To request interpreting services, go to: http://myAccess.rit.edu/

This event is part of Love Data programming at RIT Libraries. Other events include:

• February 5, 11:00am: How Data Can Save Family Farms with Jamie Sonneville (Zoom)
• February 6, 11:30am: The Intersection of Data and Photojournalism with Jenn Poggi and Josh Meltzer (Wallace 2410)
• February 14, 1:00pm: Bee My Valentine: Data Visualization in Tableau Workshop with Rebekah Walker (Wallace 2410)
• February 15, 5:00pm: Citizen Archivists: Empowering Student-Run Organizations to Preserve Their History with RIT Archives (RIT Archives Research Center, Wallace 3650)