SAVE THE DATE for Love Data Week 2027: February 8-12
Love Data Week is an annual, collaborative celebration that brings together the Big Ten Academic Alliance member universities to explore, share, and celebrate all things data. Taking place each February, this week-long event features programming hosted by member institutions that highlights the critical role data plays in research, teaching, and learning.
From hands-on workshops and expert panels to data visualization competitions and networking opportunities, Love Data Week offers students, faculty, staff, and researchers across the Alliance a chance to build data literacy skills, discover new tools and methods, and connect with peers who share their passion for working with data.
Congratulations to our 2026 Data Viz Championship Winners!
The highlight of Love Data Week, the Data Viz Championship, is an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff at member institutions to showcase their data visualization skills and compete for the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Champion title. Students were provided with a College Fight Songs dataset and tasked with creating visualizations that bring this musical tradition to life. Faculty and staff submitted data visualizations that showcase research, projects, and institutional insights from their campuses.
Finalists chosen from among all Big Ten universities competed for two awards:
Love It! Award (chosen by audience votes)
Chart Topper: Judges' Award for Excellence (selected by the judges' scoring rubric)
Indiana University
What Actually Makes a College Fight Song "Hype"?
By Edward Kim & Drew Glassman
This project explores how college fight songs generate crowd energy by examining the relationship between musical tempo (BPM) and a composite measure of lyrical aggression derived from song lyrics. The team used a two-dimensional framework to highlight distinct stylistic approaches to 'hype' and extend the analysis by examining how these styles appear across different Big Ten home-stadium environments.
Rutgers University
Stadium Roar Quadrant Map
By Sakshi Sowmya-Aravind
The primary goal of a fight song is to turn a crowd of spectators into active participants. This visualization measures how easy it is for a fan to jump into a university's fight song by plotting each school across four distinct "spirit zones."
DOUBLE WINNER:
Pennsylvania State University
Challenged Stitches: a quilt with banned book data
By Laura Guertin and Annie Jansen
This quilt is a first-time quilt and data viz collaboration between a librarian and earth scientist, both at Penn State Brandywine. The idea for this data visualization came from a series of reports from the American Library Association (ALA) that documented the attempts to censor library books and other materials. This led to having the quilt focus on 11 years of annual data on book challenges in the United States. The books are represented on a bookshelf with the height of each book left-to-right represents a year (2014-2024) and the number of books challenged per year. While constructing the quilt, Annie and Laura became concerned with the overall size, especially when scaling the numbers for each year – the 2023 data would have added much more height to the quilt. So Annie came up with the idea of having this bar/book break through the top of the quilt to call attention to this large value. This quilting duo hopes that viewers of this quilt question and reflect upon what caused the substantial rise in 2021 and moving forward. Another special part of the story behind this quilt is that it was entirely sewn in the Brandywine Library. The quilt was completed November 25, 2025, and measures 39 inches across and 46 inches in height, with the red bar extending an additional 10 inches above the quilt.
2026 Love Data Week Webinar Recordings
We had a fantastic line-up of events for Love Data Week 2026. We explored cutting-edge data and AI topics including hallucinations in large language models, practical strategies for responsible AI implementation, the current landscape of federal data regulations, and more.
We will be posting event recordings here soon.
Big Ten Academic Alliance Contacts
Lori Frost
Program Manager
Programs Team
Phone: (217) 333-9228
Danielle F. LeFaivre
Program Coordinator
Programs Team
Phone: (217) 300-4063
Institutional Coordinators
Illinois – Amy Edwards & Michelle Rome
Indiana – Bridgett Milner
Iowa – Matthew Anson
Maryland – Michelle Appel
Michigan – Ryan Thomas
Michigan State – Bethan Cantwell
Minnesota – Andrew Wilson
Nebraska – Jason Casey
Northwestern – Debbie Crimmins
Ohio State – Maureen Henry
Oregon – Travis Shea
Penn State – Jennifer Valcin
Purdue – Stephanie Dykhuizen & Andrea Pluckebaum
Rutgers – Laura Palumbo & Glenn Oldis
USC – Andrzej Rutkowski
Washington – Erin Guthrie
Wisconsin - Beth Helmueller-Perkins
Archives
View presentations, webinars, and Data Viz Championship highlights from previous years' Love Data Weeks.
