DataFest 2023

The fourth annual ASA DataFest at the University of Notre Dame hosted 13 teams with 51 student participants.  This took place March 24 through March 26, 2023.

For this competition DataFesters were analyzing data donated by the American Bar Association (ABA).  In particular, the ABA has a website where low income individuals can ask legal questions and volunteer lawyers provide responses to those questions.  The ABA had collected data on interactions between clients and lawyers and wanted to know more about those interactions so they could better prepare volunteers to address those questions.  Additionally, they wanted to use this information to recruit lawyers with specific expertise in areas where there were particularly long response times.  Since these different centers were located and managed in different states, the ABA also wanted to know if there were any states that could serve as a model for others.  Students were asked to provide advice to state partners on general trends they were seeing in the data.

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One of the really cool things about this data was that a lot of what was seen was text data.  Many students had not seen or done text analysis before, so the pre competition workshops on natural language processing (NLP) in both R and Python were helpful to teams.  Don't worry though, if a team didn't get to attend an NLP workshop, there were still plenty of other data that they could look at to come up with useful insights and spectacular visualizations.