BTAA Data Viz Championship
Ready to show your skills and put UMD on the (heat)map?
We are excited to annouce that the University of Maryland will once again be participating in the Data Viz Championship hosted by the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA)! This is an opportunity for students, as well as faculty and staff, at Big Ten institutions to showcase their data visualization skills.
Get started on your winning viz today!
Visit the BTAA's 2025 Champions page to learn about last year's winners.
Faculty and Staff
Submit a visualization using the theme of the Big Ten (i.e., athletics, enrollment data, etc.). You can also submit an existing visualization that showcases your work or research at UMD.
Visualizations can pertain to the institution as a whole or to a specific initiative or population. Your visualization should be publicly available for voting and judging. Submissions should follow institutional data policies.
Students
Your challenge is to use the Fight Songs dataset, compiled by FiveThirtyEight and updated by the BTAA, to devise a data visualization addressing a question(s) of your choice. You may supplement with additional publicly available data should you choose to do so.
Your visualization should be publicly available for voting and judging. Have fun and be creative!
Students must be actively enrolled at UMD for credit during the Spring 2026 term to qualify. Collaboration between students is permitted, and is limited to teams of two.
In case bragging rights aren't enough, in the overall BTAA Student Data Viz Championship:
- The winning student team of the BTAA Judges Award will receive a $400 scholarship.
- The winning student team of the BTAA Popular choice award will receive a $100 scholarship.
Submission
Interested students, faculty, and staff will submit their viz for internal judging at UMD. Finalists will be notified, and their viz will be submitted to represent UMD in the Big Ten Championship.
Institutional entries will be posted, by category, on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Championship website.
Ready to submit your viz?
Complete the Data Viz Championship Entry Form to submit your viz for judging at UMD.
The deadline to submit your viz for UMD's internal judging is 11:59PM on January 16, 2026.
Voting
Voting will be conducted online, and members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance community will be invited to vote for the winner. The visualization with the most votes for their category will win the Championship. Login from an account associated with a Big Ten institution will be required to vote, ensuring that individuals can vote only once.
Data Viz Showcase
February 13, 2026
Marking the culmination of Love Data Week 2026, data lovers from all Big Ten institutions will gather virtually for the Data Viz Showcase. Finalists representing each institution will be invited to present their viz. At the end of the showcase, the results of the voting will be announced, and the Championship Winners crowned!
FAQs adapted from the BTAA FAQs
FAQs
- For bragging rights!
- It makes a great line on a resume.
- In the overall BTAA Student Data Viz Championship:
- The winning student team of the BTAA Judges Award will receive a $400 scholarship.
- The winning student team of the BTAA Popular choice award will receive a $100 scholarship.
- Students can submit a work that is the result of collaboration with another person, but both must be credited.
- Faculty and staff should credit all who were involved as authors on the work.
- When collaborating, at least one person should be identified to present the work during the showcase.
- Any tool may be used (or combination of tools). This is not limited to only Tableau or PowerBI.
- Students: The only requirements are that:
- Students must use the specified dataset, identified above, at minimum. Students may supplement with additional publicly available data should they opt to do so.
- Visualizations must be publicly accessible via a link that requires no login at the time of the championship voting.
- Faculty/Staff: The only requirements for faculty/staff submissions are:
- The viz be used to share information about the institution – be it the institution as a whole or a specific initiative/population or the theme of the Big Ten.
- All submissions must follow the schools’ institutional data policies and guidelines (I.e., please do not submit a viz with Social Security Numbers, HIPAA, or other personal information).
- Visualizations must be publicly accessible via a link that requires no login at the time of the championship voting.
- Each institution will set its own guidelines for determining a viz to showcase in the Championship.
- Here at UMD the entries will first be judged by a group of data professionals organized by the Love Data Team; the final selection will be made by senior academic leaders. Those interested in participating in the judging can volunteer to do so by emailing reportsupport@umd.edu.
- Submissions will be judged internally at UMD according to the UMD Data Viz Championship Rubric.
- Please work with your university to ensure that data downloads are disabled.
- UMD students, faculty, and staff may submit questions to reportsupport@umd.edu.