UW Data Viz Challenge
Love Data Week's signature event is the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship, a friendly competition open to students, faculty, and staff at all BTAA member institutions. This competition invites students, faculty, and staff to showcase their data visualization skills and compete for the title of BTAA Data Viz Champion.
From UW-Seattle's submitted visualizations, a group of campus faculty, staff, and leadership will select one student and one faculty/staff data visualization to represent UW–Seattle. Each entrant will be invited to present their work at the virtual BTAA Data Viz Showcase held during Love Data Week (February 8-12, 2027). We will share additional details about the showcase, including how to vote, in early 2027.
We are currently accepting entries. All entries are due by 11:59 pm on Wednesday, January 6, 2027.
Submission Details
Please use our data viz submission form to enter the competition. All entries must be submitted by Wednesday, January 6, 2027.
General rules:
- Submissions can be built in any tool — Tableau, Power BI, R, Python, Julia, or even physical/hand-made objects (a Penn State team won in 2026 with a data quilt!)
- Entries must be publicly accessible via a link requiring no login during judging
- Each institution selects one student and one faculty/staff winner to advance to the BTAA-wide showcase and public vote
- No cost to enter
Student Division: Visualizations must use the official NCAA Women's Basketball dataset (play-by-play stats, box scores, rankings) selected by the BTAA for 2027. Students may supplement with additional publicly available data if they choose to do so. Students can submit work that results from collaboration with another person, but both must be credited. When collaborating, at least one person should be identified to present the work during the showcase.
Faculty/Staff Division: Submit an existing or newly created visualization using public data that highlights your institution, research, or a Big Ten–related theme (athletics, enrollment, etc.). 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. All submissions must follow the University of Washington data policies and guidelines (i.e., please do not submit a viz with Social Security Numbers or HIPAA information).
Why Participate?
Data touches every part of academic and professional life — from research design and grant compliance to institutional planning and everyday decision-making. Love Data Week is a low-barrier, high-engagement way to:
- Learn practical skills in data management, visualization, and sharing
- Discover UW resources for storing, curating, and publishing research data
- Connect with the broader Big Ten data community
- Compete in the BTAA Data Viz Championship
- Have some fun — data doesn't have to be dry!
- One entry will represent the University of Washington in the BTAA’s Data Viz Championship. The BTAA awards a $500 scholarship to the winner of the Chart Topper: Judges’ Award for Excellence (based on a scoring rubric) and a $100 Amazon gift card to the winner of the Love It! Award (based on audience votes).
Questions?
Contact the UW Love Data Week team at iads@uw.edu