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This is an opportunity for students 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 are given a data set and asked to produce a data viz for submission. See below for more information.

    Theme and Dataset

    College Fight Songs

    *Please note that the dataset has been updated to reflect all current Big Ten institutions. If students already started working with the dataset that didn't include newest members (UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington), they can update the conference data themselves or use the updated dataset linked above.

    Submission and Voting

    Each institution may submit one student 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. 

    Institutional entries will be posted by to 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. 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. Results will be announced at the end of the showcase — 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. 

    FAQs

    Why should I participate?
    • For bragging rights!
    • It makes a great line on a resume!
    Can I collaborate on my presentation?
    • Students can submit work that results from collaboration with another person, but both must be credited.
    • Faculty and staff should credit all involved as authors of the work. 
    • When collaborating, at least one person should be identified to present the work during the showcase. 
    Are there awards?

    There are two awards for each category:

    1. Love It! Award (based on audience votes)
    2. Chart Topper: Judges’ Award for Excellence (based on a scoring rubric)
    Are there minimum guidelines that must be incorporated into the work?

    Minimum guidelines include the types of visuals, data sources, or the number of visuals to use or not exceed.

    Any tool (or a combination of tools) may be used. This is not limited to Tableau or PowerBI.

    Student Requirements:

    • Students must use the FiveThirtyEight Fight Songs dataset at minimum. Students may supplement with additional publicly available data if they choose to do so. 
    • Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login during the Championship voting.  

    Faculty/Staff Requirements: 

    • The viz should be used for something related to the Big Ten (e.g., athletics, enrollment data, etc. ), public research the creator is involved in, or information about the institution—be it the institution as a whole or a specific initiative/population . 
    • All submissions must follow the schools’ institutional data policies and guidelines (i.e., please do not submit a viz with Social Security Numbers or HIPAA information).  
    • Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login during the Championship voting.

     

    How is judging happening at the university level?

    Each institution will set its own guidelines for determining a viz to showcase in the Championship. 

    How will submissions be evaluated for the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Champion competition? Each submission will be reviewed by a panel of judges using a standardized judging rubric.   
    I am part of a Medical Center at a university. Am I allowed to participate? Yes! We’d love you to submit work, attend the Championship, and vote.  
    Will the data behind my work be available to download?

     

    Please work with your university to ensure that data downloads are disabled.

    Are there resources available to learn Power BI or Tableau?

    Below is a list of resources recommended by our member institutions.  

    Power BI 

    Tableau