International Women’s Day Data Challenge 2025
R-Ladies Ottawa is hosting another data challenge to celebrate International Women’s Day 2025!
See the 2024 submissions and prompt here.
The Challenge
At our posit::conf(2024) watch party, we watched “GitHub: How To Tell Your Professional Story” by Abigail Haddad. In this presentation, Haddad highlighted the importance of building a compelling porfolio that not only highlights your skills, but also explains your professional identity.
For this year’s data challenge, we encourage you to find YOUR passion project to round out your portfolio and develop your professional story! Take a look at your GitHub profile and ask yourself, what type of project is missing here?
For example, if you participated in last year’s challenge and created a traditional plot of some sort, this year try creating a visualization using a table, dashboard or another-outside-the-box presentation tool.
For more inspo, be sure to check out our March 2025 event Coding for a Cause with Claudie Larouche!
Check out Haddad’s presentation below:
Guidelines
Although this challenge is hosted by R-Ladies Ottawa, you don’t have to use R to participate. You could use R, Python, a combination of the two, or anything you’re comfortable with!
No previous programming experience is required! If you’re interested in participating, but aren’t sure where to start, check out the recordings from our Introduction to R workshops that we hosted in early 2024. The workshops will give you a solid foundation in data analysis and data visualization using R.
While anyone is welcome to participate in the challenge and submit an entry, only submissions by women and gender minorities who reside in Canada will be eligible for the prizes.
You can participate individually, or in teams of up to 5 people!
Prizes
All submissions from women and gender minorities based in Canada will receive free hex stickers, generously donated by Posit! Among these, the most creative solution (selected by the R-Ladies Ottawa organizing team) will receive a $25 virtual gift card to Maker House! We’d like to express a huge thank you to Maker House, who offers a curated collection of gifts and homewares crafted locally in Ottawa and Canada 🍁, for donating this gift card.
How to submit an entry
This will be a month-long data challenge, and you’ll have until April 4th, 2025 to submit your entry. Your submission can be in any form you like – it can be a Quarto document, an image, a link to a webpage, or a link to a video, for example.
There are two options for submitting an entry:
- Option 1 (preferred option): If you have experience with GitHub and Quarto, you can create a pull request on this repository and add your submission to the “Submissions” part of this page.
- Option 2: If you don’t have experience with GitHub, you can email ottawa@rladies.org a link to your submission materials and we will add the link to the “Submissions” part of this page.
Showcasing your analysis
On April 8th, 2025 from 12pm-1pm, R-Ladies Ottawa will host a virtual event where participants can showcase their work. This is a great way to learn from one another and to connect with other like-minded individuals!
Submissions
Sofia Balaceanu
Sofia’s project is called Visualizations of OC Transpo Data Against Canada Census Data and can be found here.
Camy Kam
Camy’s submission is titled Evaluating Top Nail Salons Near Me in Ottawa, and can be found here.
Karen Fletcher
Karen’s submission is a project that performs a Hierarchical Bayesian Linear Regression to investigate how group and type of a meteorite impact their mass in grams and can be found here.
Tomas McNamer
Tomas’ submission is titled Visualization of Ontario High School OSSLT and Math Scores, and can be found here.
Alex McSween
Alex’s submission is a quarto dashboard of her knitting activity over time from ravelry. Alex’s submission is here and her code is here.
Brittny Vongdara
As a starting point to get familiar with scrollytelling, Brittny used the [closeread] extensions from Quarto to show a fun way to look at data and text about action movies. You can find her submission here.