BTAA Student Winner:
Lauren Hyde – University of Illinois
BTAA Faculty/Staff Winners:
Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider & Louisa Zhang – University of Illinois
Love Data Week Events
Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, taking place every year during the week of Valentine’s Day (February 10-14, 2025).
More information about Love Data Week
Data Explorers Series: Love Data Week – Illinois Data Viz Competition: Tuesday, February 11, 2025, 9am-10am (Click here to JOIN the Meeting) Presenters: Nathan Jeffery, ZJ Zhou & Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider
BTAA Data Viz Championship
Details regarding the 2025 Data Viz Championship can be found here.
Participation
The campus competition was open to all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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.
- Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login during the Championship voting.
- Students must be actively enrolled at the institution for undergraduate or graduate coursework, thesis, or dissertation study.
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).
- Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login during the Championship voting.
Congratulations to our University of Illinois competition winners!
Illinois submitted one student visualization and one faculty/staff visualization to the BTAA for the Data Viz Championship.
Student Submission: Americans Value National Parks More than Ever (Lauren Hyde)
“This set of interactive visualizations shows trends in recreational visitor counts for the most and least popular national parks over the past 30 years, demonstrating that both highly-visited and less-visited parks have seen significant increases in popularity in the past several decades. The radial design shows the yearly fluctuations and growth rates of individual parks while also highlighting the overall growth of each set of parks.”
Employee Submission: Trends in High School GPAs among Incoming Freshman Classes of Big Ten Schools (Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider & Louisa Zhang)
“In Fall 2023, the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported a record 83.8% of their incoming, first-semester freshman class reported an unweighted high school GPA of at least 3.75. Among those students, nearly half (47.8%) of the incoming freshman class reported a perfect 4.00 GPA. Several research papers have studied the multi-decade trend of GPAs increasing over time, but we found no widely available data exploring the impact of the Big Ten. This work explores the first-semester freshman demographics published by all sixteen Big Ten schools.
Specifically, this work primarily focused on the percentage of students in each freshman class that have high school GPA of at least 3.75. Nerd out with the data with several interactive visualizations that let you do a deep dive into the high school GPAs of the incoming freshman classes across the Big Ten over the past 20 years!”
Honorable Mention:
National Park Visit Planner (Nathan Jeffery)
“In building this dashboard, I wanted to partially answer the question, “What information would be useful if I wanted to visit a national park?” The dashboard has tabs that display which parks are closest to a given location and which contain specific species.”
National Parks via Lens of Recreation and Citizen Science (Zhijie “ZJ” Zhou)
“National parks in the United States are not only vital sanctuaries for biodiversity, but also serve as hubs for both recreation and citizen science. Each year, millions of visitors explore these landscapes, many of whom contribute to biodiversity monitoring through platforms like iNaturalist. This platform allows individuals to record and share species observations, helping expand our understanding of the natural world. This storymap investigates the relationship between recreational visits and citizen science data within 63 U.S. national parks. By analyzing the connection between visitation rates and the number of research-grade species observations, we aim to explore whether parks with higher visitation also see greater citizen science participation. This analysis further delves into how human activity influences the documentation of biodiversity and what implications this may have for conservation science.”
Vote for your favorite visualization!
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. Voting will be conducted from February 3 through noon, February 14, 2025. 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 February 14 at 1 PM Central. At the end of the showcase, the results of the voting will be announced, and the Challenge Winners crowned.
Additional Information
More information about BTAA Love Data Week may be found here: Overview | Big Ten Academic Alliance.
For more information about Love Data Week at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, feel free to email Amy Edwards at aledward@illinois.edu.