Love Data Week: NU Students Shine in Data Viz Championship

This Valentine’s Day, show your love for data.

Northwestern students, faculty, and staff participate in a week-long celebration of data storytelling, creativity, and innovation as part of the international Love Data Week event. The week celebrates data and aims to unite people to share their experiences, learn best practices, and have fun with data.

As part of the festivities, each Big Ten institution submits one student data visualization to the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Data Viz Championship, and the BTAA community votes for their favorite entries.

Among the standout entries was Weinberg College student Isabel Su, who won first place with an interactive data visualization exploring the evolution of RV camping in National Parks since 1979. Su makes the data feel like an outdoor adventure. The visualization (below) depicts the data with an RV that playfully bobs along the data line as if climbing hills and descending into valleys on a road trip.

Northwestern’s Love Data Week culminates with a NU Data Viz Championship on Valentine’s Day, where students, faculty, and staff showcase their cutting-edge visualizations that transform complex data into compelling insights. Explore the winning student data visualizations gallery here.

2024 Northwestern Data Viz Championship Student Winners

1st Place

• Isabel Su: RV Camping Throughout Time

2nd Place

• Cassie Lee: National Park Historic Visitation and Visitor Spending Effects Dashboard
• Alice Kang: Racial Disparities in Access to National Parks

3rd Place

• Tosin Okoh and Sarah Abara: National Park Visualizer