Love Data Week

February 9-13, 2026

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Love Data Week

Save the Date!

February 9-13, 2026 marks the annual international celebration of Love Data Week. Love Data Week is a celebration of data, taking place every year during the week of Valentine's Day.

Originally coordinated by Heather Coates in 2016, 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. This international celebration of data is now hosted at the University of Michigan’s ICPSR, with many Big Ten institutions coordinating their own institutional celebrations. 

Michigan State University is participating in Love Data Week by hosting data events and educational opportunities targeted towards MSU faculty, staff, and students and by participating in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship.

 

Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship Rules

As part of Love Data Week the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is hosting the second annual Data Viz Championship across all the institutions. The event is open to all MSU students and employees and is an opportunity to show case MSU’s data visualization abilities. Provost McIntyre will judge the MSU winner and the winner will receive a certificate from President Guskiewicz! The winning entry will then be provided to the BTAA for judging across the whole of the BTAA. 

Students

Student Theme: College Fight Songs

Student Prizes:

  • Signed certificate from President Guskiewicz

Special thanks to FiveThirtyEight for compiling the original dataset. Please note that the updated dataset linked above has been updated to reflect current data for Big Ten institutions. If you've already started working with the original dataset, you're welcome to update the conference data yourself or use the updated dataset.


Click Here to vote for the 2026 BTAA Student Data Viz Championship

Faculty/Staff

Faculty/Staff Theme: Public research that they are involved in at their home university, or use the Big Ten Theme.

Faculty/Staff Prizes:

  • Signed certificate from President Guskiewicz


Click Here to vote for the 2026 BTAA Faculty/Staff Data Viz Championship

Resources: 

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. This is a two-step process. First, submit your entry through this form. One student and one faculty/staff submission will be chosen to move onto to compete in the BTAA Data Viz Championship. Institution submissions are due January 12, 2026.

Please save the date for the Showcase. For more information, contact irdata@msu.edu.

Enter Here

 

Frequently Asked Questions

  • For bragging rights! You will be the BTAA Data Viz Champ.
  • It makes a great line on a resume!
  • 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. 

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

  • Student Requirements:
    • Students must use the Fight Song Data Set at minimum.
    • 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. ) 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.

Yes! We’d love for you to submit work, attend the Championship, and vote.

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

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