Visualising the UK’s LGBTQ+ population
Date: 25 February 2026
Time: 7pm–9pm UTC
Location: Online
Abstract
In 2021/2022 the UK censuses represented LGBTQ+ people in new ways. The aim of this workshop is to introduce participants to this data and encourage them to produce visualisations utilising it. This workshop is ran in association with the University of Edinburgh’s Gender and Sexuality Data Lab and is heavily inspired by Tidy Tuesday. In the first part of this workshop queer feminist researcher and educator, Kirstie Ken English, will explain how LGBTQ+ populations were represented in the UK censuses and discuss the data available. In the second half data visualisation expert, Nicola Rennie, will walk participants through the code of an example visualisation of the census data. This workshop is a jumping off activity as participants will be prompted to design their own visualisations and share them in the weeks following the conference on Bluesky and LinkedIn via the #VisLGBTQ. Alongside discussions of the value of visualisations the workshop will be a space to recognise the limitations in how LGBTQ+ census data has been shared. Data sets and example code will be provided to all participants.
More information on the conference website.