Love Data Week

Kick-off Event Information

Calling all students, faculty, and staff at Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions! Showcase your data visualization skills and compete for the prestigious Big Ten Data Viz Championship Title. Join us for an informative webinar that will guide you through the essentials of preparing data, creating visualizations, and publishing on Tableau.

Webinar Details:

• Date: Tuesday, November 12th
• Time: 1 p.m. CT / 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT
• Duration: 60 minutes
• Platform: Zoom (Registration required)
• Presenter: Ryan Caldwell, Senior Associate Director, Data Management & Decision Support Analytics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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.

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. Have fun and be creative! Students must be actively enrolled at the institution for graduate or undergraduate coursework, thesis, or dissertation study.

Faculty/Staff

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.

Resources: 

• Data Prompts
• Sample Prompts
• Tutorials
• Datasets

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 TBA.

Voting

Institutional entries will be posted, by category, on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Challenge website, and members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance community will be invited to vote for the winner. Voting will be conducted from (dates TBA.). 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 on TBA. At the end of the showcase the results of the voting will be announced, and the Challenge Winners crowned.

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

Enter Here

1. Follow @‌lovedataweek on X and Instagram and spread the word about Love Data Week 2025.
2. Attend one (or more!) of the Love Data Week activities virtually from wherever you are. Check out the calendar of events.
3. Participate in ICPSR’s yearly Adopt a Dataset Program – learn about it and share how it could be an agent of change.
4. Recognize colleagues for their participation in Love Data Week activities and events with a Love Data Week-specific Certificate of Participation.
5. Use a cool Love Data Week background graphic as your Zoom background or screensaver.
6. Download, print, and share Love Data Week stickers with friends, students, and colleagues.
7. Have a data trivia contest with your team, office, staff, classroom, students, or family – and tell us what happened. (If you’re following us on social media, you’ll be able to see our daily trivia questions during Love Data Week.)

• 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 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.
  • 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.