Vote today for the Big Ten Data Viz Championship’s Love It! Award.
How can I celebrate Love Data Week at UW—Madison?
Love Data Week, held annually during Valentine’s week, is an international celebration of data that invites institutions and individuals to explore how data shapes our world. The Office of Data, Academic Planning & Institutional Research (DAPIR) and the UW-Madison Libraries proudly sponsor UW–Madison’s Love Data Week, which includes a partnership with Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA).
- Register for Love Data Week events.
- Learn 3 quick tips to organize and protect your data that take about 3 minutes each.
- Discover more ways to grow your passion for data.
- Check out Bucky’s Data Viz Challenge winners
- Vote for the BTAA’s Love It! Award and help decide the best student and faculty and staff data visualizations.
Love Data Week events (advance registration required)
Monday
There are no upcoming events.
Tuesday
There are no upcoming events.
Wednesday
There are no upcoming events.
Thursday
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Feb12
Dashboard Duel: Power BI vs. Tableau – Iowa vs. Ohio State @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Feb12
The Great Data Backup @ 4:00 pm - 8:00 pm Memorial Library, room 224 for in-person attendees. Via Zoom for online attendees (zoom link provided after registration).
Friday
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Feb13
Big Ten Data Viz Championship Showcase: Discover the Champions @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
3 quick tips that take 3 minutes each on how to organize and protect your data
Bring a sense of order to your Google Drive, Box, or SharePoint storage.
Take 3 minutes to organize your top-level and save time later on when you can easily find materials and the correct version!
Create a README file (example) for your most important data set, in plain text (.txt) or markdown (.md) format.
Do you know how to apply privacy principles at work?
While Wisconsin doesn’t have a comprehensive state privacy law, data privacy is still vital to our institution, employees, and students. Here are 7 generally accepted privacy principles.
Winners of Bucky's Data Viz Challenge advancing to BTAA Data Viz Championship
Congratulations to the winners of Bucky’s Data Viz Challenge—Barnabas Valko (student) and Andrew Hahn (faculty/staff). Barnabas and Andrew will represent UW—Madison at the BTAA’s Data Viz Championship, held in conjunction with Love Data Week. For Bucky’s Data Viz Challenge and the BTAA Data Viz Championship, faculty and staff can submit an existing visualization. Students must use a provided dataset to produce a data visualization for submission. In 2026, the student dataset was college fight songs.
Be sure to vote for the BTAA’s Love It! Award. For inspiration, review the 2026 Bucky’s Data Viz Challenge gallery to view all entries.
Winning student entry
The Geometry of College Fight Songs
Submitted by Barnabas Valko.
Description: The dashboard contains four distinct data visualizations. The Trope-O-Meter quantifies lyrical clichés. The Jaccard Network connects songs by similar tropes—Song Topology plots tempo (BPM) against duration. Origin Story shows how songs were created. Clicking a logo analyzes that school’s fight song, activating a central info panel that displays the title, author, and origin, and includes an embedded Spotify player for the song.
Winning faculty/staff entry
A Crochet Land Cover Map of Wisconsin
Submitted by Andrew Hahn.
Description: If you were a giant with hands the size of Wisconsin, what would our home state feel like to touch? Could you feel the bumpy tree canopies of the northwoods and the soft, stringy grasses in the driftless? Would you be able to follow our straight rows of corn and soy, and graze the cool, flat lakes and wetlands carved into the earth by glaciers thousands of years ago? This map is an experiment in texture and generalization, and it uses a unique mix of physical and digital techniques to transform a highly detailed landcover dataset into a physical surface intended to be read as much with your hands as your eyes.
BTAA Data Viz Championship Love It! Award Voting
You can help crown the 2026 Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Data Viz Champions, a part of UW—Madison’s Love Data Week celebration. Audience votes determine Love It! Award winners.
Voting is easy! Review the BTAA galleries, and be sure to check out UW— Madison’s entries. Then cast your vote!
- Gallery and voting for student visualizations.
- Gallery and voting for faculty and staff visualizations.
The fine print:
- You must be a student, faculty, or staff member at a BTAA institution to vote.
- You may only vote once in each category.
- Voting closes at noon (CT) on Friday, February 13.
- A second award for submissions, the Chart Topper: Judges’ Award for Excellence, will be selected by a judges’ scoring rubric.
Register now for the Big Ten Data Viz Championship showcase, where creativity meets insight in a celebration of data storytelling across the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Barnabus and Andrew will share their data visualization along with the entries from other participating universities.
More ways to grow your passion for data
Handle with care! Tips for managing your research data to prevent data loss, collaborate better, and meet the requirements of funders and publishers.
Secure data management starts with you! Discover 5 ways to make sure you are using protected institutional data responsibly.
Understanding UW–Madison through data: 4 resources you should know. UW-Madison’s institutional data informs strategic, academic, and budgetary planning decisions. These four institutional data resources can get you started.
Data@UW – Data Governance and Responsible Use, a 30-minute, self-paced employee module, helps you understand your responsibilities to protect the institutional data that employees collect and use daily.
Want to learn more about protecting student data? The Office of the Registrar, responsible for student data, is a central campus resource for FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and offers two ways to access FERPA training.
Students, take a minute to learn more about how your personal data is used at UW–Madison. The Office of the Registrar is a central campus resource for student record information and offers a number of ways that you can understand, control, and update your personal data.
Find out about a Data Classification Initiative rolling out in 2026 in an effort to strengthen compliance and lower security risk across the university.
DAPIR and the UW-Madison Libraries sponsor UW—Madison’s Love Data Week.
Thank you to the BTAA and the many volunteers, speakers, and supporters who helped make Love Data Week 2026 a success.
