2025 Love Data Week
Save the Date! This year's Love Data Week officially starts on February 10, 2025
Data Viz Championship
Calling all Northwestern students, faculty, and staff! Showcase your data visualization skills for the chance to win cash prizes and compete for the prestigious Big Ten Data Viz Championship Title. Students will be given a data set and asked to produce a data viz for submission, while faculty/staff may either submit a visualization using the theme of the Big Ten (e.g., athletics, enrollment data, etc.) or an existing viz that highlights their institution.
Details regarding the 2025 Data Viz Championship can be found here.
Cash prizes will be awarded to Northwestern participants who finish 1st ($250), 2nd ($150), or 3rd ($75) in either the student or faculty/staff category.
How to Participate
Students Requirements:- Students must use the U.S. National Park Visit Data (1979-2023)—Responsible Datasets in Context (responsible-datasets-in-context.com) at minimum. Students may supplement with additional publicly available data if they choose to do so.
- Students must be actively enrolled at the institution for undergraduate or graduate coursework, thesis, or dissertation study.
Other resources can be found here.
Faculty/Staff Requirements:
- Submit a visualization using the theme of the Big Ten (e.g., athletics, enrollment data, etc.) 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).
Sample prompts and other resources can be found here.
Office Hours
Are you interested in participating in the competition, but unsure where to start or how to finish? Everyone planning to submit a visualization is invited to attend open office hours January 9th from 12-3pm in the Mudd Library GIS Lab Room 2122. Experts in data visualization and GIS from Northwestern's Research Computing and Data Services team and the Libraries will be available to answer questions, provide feedback, brainstorm, and help make your visualizations the best they can be. Don't miss this opportunity!
Submitting to the Northwestern Competition
Submission Deadline: January 13, 2025 at 11:59pm
All entries must be submitted using the online submission form linked below. Entries will be judged by a panel of Northwestern visualization experts. Designers of the top three submissions for the Northwestern competition in both categories, students and faculty/staff, will receive cash prizes (see above). The first place winner in each category will be submitted to the Big Ten Data Viz Championship (see below).
Submit your data visualization!
Big Ten Data Viz Championship
Each Big Ten institution may submit one student visualization and one faculty/staff visualization to the Championship. Institutional entries will be posted, by category, on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Challenge website, and members of the BTAA 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 during Love Data Week. At the end of the showcase, the results of the voting will be announced, and the Challenge Winners crowned. The showcase date and time will be announced soon.
Please share this information with interested students, faculty, and staff. If you have any questions, email us at nu-love-data-week@northwestern.edu.