Compete in the Big Ten Academic Alliance 2025 Data Viz Championship

This is an opportunity for students, as well as faculty and staff, at Big Ten institutions to showcase their data visualization skills and to compete for the title of Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Champion.  Students will be given a data set and asked to produce a data viz for submission, while faculty/staff may submit an existing viz that highlights their institution or one of its projects. 

This Championship is part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s collaboration to celebrate International Love Data WeekOriginally coordinated by Heather Coates, International Love Data Week is a celebration of all things data that seeks to bring people together to share their experiences, learn best practices, and have some fun. The international effort is now hosted at the University of Michigan’s  ICPSR, and many Big Ten institutions coordinate their own institutional celebrations.  

Students

Your challenge is to use the  U.S. National Park Visit Data (1979-2023) – Responsible Datasets in Context (responsible-datasets-in-context.com) to devise a data visualization to address the question(s) of your choice. You may supplement with additional publicly available data should you choose to do so. Your visualization should be publicly available for voting and judging. Have fun and be creative!

Students must be actively enrolled at the institution for graduate or undergraduate coursework, thesis, or dissertation study. 

Faculty/Staff

Submit a visualization using the theme of the Big Ten (i.e., athletics, enrollment data, etc.).  You can also submit an existing visualization used at your institution. Visualizations can pertain to the institution as a whole or to a specific initiative or population. Submissions should follow institutional data policies.  

Submission to the Challenge

Each institution may submit one student visualization and one faculty/staff visualization to the Championship. Submissions should be sent via the institutional coordinators and must include an image for use in a thumbnail, a title, a short description, and a publicly available URL.  Check with your institutional coordinator for campus deadlines. 

Voting and Data Viz Showcase

Institutional entries will be posted by category on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Championship website, and members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance community will be invited to vote for the winner. The visualization with the most votes for their category will win the Challenge. Login from an account associated with a Big Ten institution will be required to vote, ensuring that individuals can vote only once.  

Each entrant will be invited to present their work at the Data Viz Showcase. At the end of the showcase, the results will be announced, and the Champions will be crowned. The showcase date and time will be announced soon.

For more information, contact Lori Frost or your Institutional Coordinator.