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 9-13, 2026).
More information about Love Data Week
BTAA Data Viz Championship
Congratulations to our 2026 University of Illinois competition winners!
Student Submission: The College Fight Song Breakdown (Andrea Turek)
Employee Submission: Illinois App Users & Popular Pathways (Cameron Schwing)
All University of Illinois 2026 Data Viz submissions may be viewed at https://publish.illinois.edu/lovedataweek/love-data-week-2026-data-viz-competition/
Participation
- The campus competition is open to all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Students Requirements
- Students must use the FiveThirtyEight fight song dataset* 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.
- Additional information about the student data set can be found here: Data Set Description
*Please note that the dataset has been updated to reflect all current Big Ten institutions. If students already started working with the dataset that didn’t include the newest members (UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington) and would like to update their dataset, they can update the conference data themselves or use the updated dataset linked above.
Faculty/Staff Requirements
- Submit a visualization using information about the institution—be it the institution as a whole or a specific initiative/population, the theme of the Big Ten (e.g., athletics, enrollment data, etc.), or public research in which you are involved.
- 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.
Submission Form
All entries must be submitted using the online submission form. Visualizations must be accessible via a link that requires no login. The deadline for submissions is 11:59pm CST on Wednesday, January 14, 2026.
Winners will be announced the week of January 26, 2026. Voting information will be shared on the competition website when available.
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.